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Edition 00 ICttxe 

The Edition de Luxe is printed from type and will 
be limited to Five Hundred Copies, of which this is 



No. 



GEBBIE and COMPANY. 



r ' 



President. 




Secretary. 



UNIFORM EDITION 



OLIVER CROMWELL 



The Story of His Life and Work 



By 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



, > :> 



PHILADELPHIA 

GEBBIE AND COMPANY 

1903 



W V 



El* 
.7 

Copy J 





1 HE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS. 






1 o/e Copies Recoivei.' 






OCT 15 1903 






Copyright Entry 






CU-ujl.. Ur. la 2 
CLAS9- V C\- XXc. No 






i S 4- (3 
COPY B. 




Copyright, 1900 
Copyright, 190J 


by 


CHARL 


ES SCRIBNER'S 


SONS 



This edition of "Oliver Cromwell" is issued under special 
arrangement with Charles Scribner's Sons 



► • • • • • i » I 



Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud 
Not of war only, but detractions rude, 
Guided by faith, and matchless fortitude, 
To peace and truth, thy glorious way hast ploughed, 

And on the neck of crowned fortune proud 

Hast reared God's trophies, and his work pursued, 
While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots imbrued, 
And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud, 

And Worcester's laureate wreath. Yet much remains 
To conquer still ; Peace hath her victories 
No less renowned than War: new foes arise, 

Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains. 

Help us to save free conscience from the paw 

Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw. 

Milton. 

Executive Chamber, Albany, 
June, 1900. 



Ill 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I pagb 

The Times and the Man i 

CHAPTER II 
The Long Parliament and the Civil War 49 

CHAPTER III 
The Second Civil War and the Death of the King. . 95 

CHAPTER IV 
The Irish and Scotch Wars 136 

CHAPTER V 
The Commonwealth and Protectorate 171 

CHAPTER VI 
Personal Rule 203 

Index 333 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Cromwell Leading the Assault on 

Drogheda . . . . Frontispiece 

F. C. Yohn 

Dissolving the Long Parliament . . 180 

Seymour Lucas 

Installation of Cromwell as Protector . 192 
F. C. Yohn 

Last Charge of the Ironsides . . .221 
F. C. Yohn 



vu 



OLIVER CROMWELL 



CHAPTER I. 

THE TIMES AND THE MAN. 

FOR over a century and a half after his death 
the memory of the greatest Englishman of 
the seventeenth century was looked upon 
with horror by the leaders of English thought, 
political and literary ; the very men who were car- 
rying to fruition Cromwell's tremendous policies 
being often utterly ignorant that they were follow- 
ing in his footsteps. At last the scales began to 
drop from the most far-seeing eyes. Macaulay, 
with his eminently sane and wholesome spirit, held 
Cromwell and the social forces for which he stood 
— Puritanic and otherwise — at their real worth, 
and his judgment about them was, in all essen- 
tials, accurate. But the true appreciation of the 
place held by the greatest soldier-statesman of the 
seventeenth century began with the publication 
of his life and letters by Carlyle. The gnarled 
genius of the man who worshiped the heroes of 



2 Oliver Cromwell 

the past as intensely as he feared and distrusted 
the heroes of the present, enabled him to write 
with a loftiness and intensity that befitted his sub- 
ject. But Carlyle's singular incapacity to "see 
veracity," as he would himself have phrased it, 
made him at times not merely tell half-truths, but 
deliberately invert the truth. He was of that not 
uncommon cloistered type which shrinks shud- 
dering from actual contact with whatever it, in 
theory, most admires, and which, therefore, is 
reduced in self -justification to misjudge and mis- 
represent those facts of past history which form 
precedents for what is going on before the author's 
own eyes. 

Cromwell lived in an age when it was not pos- 
sible to realize a government based upon those 
large principles of social, political, and religious 
liberty in which — at any rate, during his earlier 
years — he sincerely believed; but the movement 
of which he was the head was the first of the great 
movements which, marching along essentially the 
same lines, have produced the English-speaking 
world as we at present know it. This primary 
fact Carlyle refused to see, or at least to admit. 
As the central idea of his work he states that the 
Puritanism of the Cromwellian epoch was the 
"last glimpse of the Godlike vanishing from this 
England; conviction and veracity giving place 
to hollow cant and formulism. . . . The last of 



The Times and the Man 3 

all our Heroisms. . . . We have wandered far 
away from the ideas which guided us in that cen- 
tury, and indeed which had guided us in all pre- 
ceding centuries, but of which that century was 
the ultimate manifestation; we have wandered 
very far; and must endeavor to return and con- 
nect ourselves therewith again. ... I will advise 
my reader to forget the modern methods of reform ; 
not to remember that he has ever heard of a mod- 
ern individual called by the name of 'Reformer,' 
if he would understand what the old meaning of 
the word was. The Crom wells, Pyms, and Hamp- 
dens, who were understood on the Royalist side to 
be firebrands of the devil, have had still worse 
measure from the Dry-as-Dust philosophies and 
skeptical histories of later times. They really did 
resemble firebrands of the devil if you looked at 
them through spectacles of a certain color, for fire 
is always fire ; but by no spectacles, only by mere 
blindness and wooden-eyed spectacles, can the 
flame-girt heaven's messenger pass for a poor, 
moldy Pedant and Constitution-monger such as 
these would make him out to be." 

This is good writing of its kind; but the 
thought is mere "hollow cant and unveracity;" 
not only far from the truth, but the direct reverse 
of the truth. It is itself the wail of the pedant 
who does not know that the flame-girt heaven's 
messenger of truth is always a mere mortal to 



4 Oliver Cromwell 

those who see him with the actual eyes of the 
flesh, although mayhap a great mortal; while to 
the closet philosopher his quality of flame-girted- 
ness is rarely visible until a century or thereabouts 
has elapsed. 

So far from this great movement, of which 
Puritanism was merely one manifestation, being 
the last of a succession of similar heroisms, it had 
practically very much less connection with what 
went before than with all that has guided us in 
our history since. Of course, it is impossible to 
draw a line with mathematical exactness between 
the different stages of history, but it is both pos- 
sible and necessary to draw it with rough effi- 
ciency; and, speaking roughly, the epoch of the 
Puritans was the beginning of the great modern 
epoch of the English-speaking world — infinitely 
its greatest epoch. We have not "wandered far 
from the ideas that guided" the wisest and most 
earnest leaders in the century that saw Cromwell ; 
on the contrary, these ideas were themselves very 
far indeed from those which had guided the Eng- 
lish people in previous ages, and the ideas that 
now guide us represent on the whole what was 
best and truest in the thought of the Puritans. 
As for Pym and Hampden, their type had prac- 
tically no representative in England prior to their 
time, while all the great legislative reformers since 
then have been their followers. The Hampden 



The Times and the Man 5 

type — the purest and noblest of types — reached 
its highest expression in Washington. Pym, the 
man of great powers and great services, with a 
tendency to believe that Parliamentary govern- 
ment was the cure for all evils, followed to a line 
" the modern methods of reform," and was exactly 
the man who, if he had lived in Carlyle's day, 
Carlyle would have sneered at as a "constitution- 
monger." It was men of the kind of Hampden 
and Pym who, before Carlyle's own eyes, were 
striving in the British Parliament for the reforms 
which were to carry one stage farther the work 
of Hampden and Pym; who were endeavoring 
to secure for all creeds full tolerance ; to give the 
people an ever-increasing share in ruling their 
own destinies; to better the conditions of social 
and political life. In the great American Civil 
War the master spirits in the contest for union 
and freedom were actuated by a fervor as intense 
as, and even finer than, that which actuated the 
men of the Long Parliament; while in rigid 
morality and grim devotion to what he conceived 
to be God's bidding, the Southern soldier, Stone- 
wall Jackson, was as true a type of the "Gen- 
eral of the Lord, with his Bible and his Sword," 
as Cromwell or Ireton. 

The whole history of the movement which re- 
sulted in the establishment of the Commonwealth 
of England will be misread and misunderstood if 



6 Oliver Cromwell 

we fail to appreciate that it was the first modern, 
and not the last medieval, movement; if we fail 
to understand that the men who figured in it and 
the principles for which they contended, are 
strictly akin to the men and the principles that 
have appeared in all similar great movements 
since: in the English Revolution of 1688; in the 
American Revolution of 1776; and the American 
Civil War of 1861. We must keep ever in mind 
the essentially modern character of the movement 
if we are to appreciate its true inwardness, its 
true significance. Fundamentally, it was the first 
struggle for religious, political, and social freedom, 
as we now understand the terms. As was inev- 
itable in such a first struggle, there remained 
even among the forces of reform much of what 
properly belonged to previous generations. In 
addition to the modern side there was a medieval 
side, too. Just so far as this medieval element 
obtained, the movement failed. All that there 
was of good and of permanence in it was due to 
the new elements. 

To understand the play of the forces which 
produced Cromwell and gave him his chance, we 
must briefly look at the England into which he 
was born. 

He saw the light at the close of the reign 
of Queen Elizabeth, in the last years of the 
Tudor dynasty, and he grew to manhood during 



The Times and the Man 7 

the inglorious reign of the first English king of 
the inglorious House of Stuart. The struggle 
between the reformed churches and the ancient 
church, against which they were in revolt, was still 
the leading factor in shaping European politics, 
though other factors were fast assuming an equal 
weight. The course of the Reformation in Eng- 
land had been widely different from that which 
it had followed in other European countries. 
The followers of Luther and Calvin, whatever 
their shortcomings — and they were many and 
grievous — had been influenced by a fiery zeal for 
righteousness, a fierce detestation of spiritual cor- 
ruption; but in England the Reformation had 
been undertaken for widely different reasons by 
Henry VIII. and his creatures, though the bulk 
of their followers were as sincere as their brethren 
on the Continent. Henry's purpose had been 
simple, namely, to transfer to himself the power 
and revenues of the Papacy, so far as he could 
seize them, and thus to add to the spiritual 
supremacy against which the leaders of the 
Reformation had revolted: the absolute sov- 
ereignty which the Tudors were seeking to 
establish in England. Elizabeth stood infinitely 
above her father in most respects ; but in religious 
views they were not far apart, and in theory they 
were both believers in absolutism. They had no 
standing army, and they were always in want of 



8 Oliver Cromwell 

money, so that in practice they never ventured 
seriously to offend the influential and moneyed 
classes. But under Henry the misery and suffer- 
ing of the lower classes became very great, and 
the yeomen were largely driven from their lands, 
while much of Elizabeth's own administration 
consisted of efforts to grapple with the vagrancy 
and wretchedness which had been caused by the 
degradation of those who stood lowest in the 
social scale. 

When the Stuarts took possession of the throne 
of England they found a people which, unlike 
the peoples of most of the neighboring states, had 
not fought out its religious convictions. The 
Reformation had deeply stirred men's souls. 
Religion had become a matter of vital and terri- 
ble importance to Protestant and to Catholic. 
Among the extremists, the men who had given 
the tone to the Reformation in Germany, Switz- 
erland, Holland, and Scotland, religion, as they 
understood it, entered into every act of their lives. 
In England there were men of this stamp ; but in 
the English Reformation they had played a wholly 
subordinate part ; and indeed had been in almost 
as great danger as the Catholics. Their force, 
therefore, had not spent itself. It had been con- 
served, in spite of their desires. 

Thus it happened that the high tide of extreme 
Protestantism was reached in England, not as 



The Times and the Man 9 

in other Protestant countries, in the sixteenth 
century, but in the seventeenth. The Stuarts 
were the only Protestant kings who were not in 
religious sympathy with their Protestant subjects. 
In theory the Anglican Church of Henry and 
Elizabeth stood for what we would now regard as 
tyranny. What Henry VIII. strove to do with 
the Anglican Church is what has actually been 
done by the Czars with the Orthodox Church in 
Russia ; but that which was possible with the east- 
ern Slavs was not possible with the westernmost 
and freest of the Teutonic peoples. Yet in the 
actual event it was probably fortunate that the 
English Reformation took the shape it did; for 
under such conditions it was not marked by the 
intense fanaticism of the reformers elsewhere. 

The Stuarts not only found themselves masters 
of a kingdom where, supposedly, they were spirit- 
ually supreme, while actually their claim to su- 
premacy was certain to be challenged ; they also 
found themselves at the head of a form of govern- 
ment which was to all appearances despotic, while 
the people over whom they bore sway, though 
slow to object to the forms, were extremely intol- 
erant of the practices of despotism. The Tudors 
were unarmed despots, who disliked the old feudal 
nobility, and who found it for their interest to 
cultivate the commercial classes, and to form a 
new nobility of their own, based upon wealth. 



io Oliver Cromwell 

The men at the lowest round of the social ladder — 
the workingmen and farm laborers — were yet, as 
they remained for a couple of centuries, so unfit 
for the work of political combination that they 
could be safely disregarded by the masters of Eng- 
land. At times their discontent was manifested, 
generally in the shape of abortive peasant insur- 
rections; but there was never need to consider 
them as of serious and permanent importance. 
The middle classes, however, had become very 
powerful, and to their material interests the Tudors 
always took care to defer. At the very close of 
her reign, Elizabeth, who was at heart as thorough 
a tyrant as ever lived, but who possessed that 
shrewd good sense which, if not the noblest, is 
perhaps on the whole the most useful of qualities 
in the actual workaday world, found herself face 
to face with her people on the question of monop- 
olies; and as soon as she understood that they 
were resolutely opposed to her policy, she instantly 
yielded. In other words, the Tudor despotism 
was conditioned upon the despot's doing nothing 
of which the influential classes of the nation — the 
upper and middle classes — seriously disapproved ; 
and this the Stuart kings could 'never understand. 
Moreover, apart from the fact that the Stuarts 
were so much less shrewd and less able than the 
Tudors, there was the further fact that Englishmen 
as a whole were gradually growing more intolerant, 



The Times and the Man u 

not only of the practice but of the pretense of 
tyranny, whether in things material or in things 
spiritual. There was a moral awakening which 
rendered it impossible for Englishmen of the sev- 
enteenth century to submit to the brutal wrong- 
doing which marked the political and ecclesiastical 
tyranny of the previous century. The career of 
Henry VIII. could not have been paralleled in 
any shape when once England had begun to breed 
such men as went to the making of the Long 
Parliament. 

Much of the aspiration after higher things took 
the form of spiritual unrest. It must always be 
remembered that the Protestant sects which estab- 
lished themselves in the northern half of Europe, 
although they warred in the name of religious 
liberty, had no more conception of it, as we of this 
day understand it, than their Catholic foes; and 
yet it must also be remembered that the bitter 
conflicts they waged prepared the way for the 
wide tolerance of individual difference in matters 
of religious belief which is among the greatest 
blessings of our modern life. An American Cath- 
olic and an American Protestant of to-day, what- 
ever the difference between their theologies, yet 
in their ways of looking at real life, at its relation 
to religion, and the relations of religion and the 
state, are infinitely more akin to one another than 
either is to the men of his religious faith who lived 



i2 Oliver Cromwell 

three centuries ago. We now admit, as a matter 
of course, that any man may, in religious matters, 
profess to be guided by authority or by reason, as 
suits him best; but that he must not interfere 
with similar freedom of belief in others ; and that 
all men, whatever their religious beliefs, have 
exactly the same political rights and are to be held 
to the same responsibility for the way they exercise 
these rights. Few indeed were the men who held 
such views at the time when Cromwell was grow- 
ing to manhood. Holland was the State of all 
others in which there was the nearest approach to 
religious liberty ; and even in Holland the bitter- 
ness of the Calvinists toward the Arminians was 
something which we can now scarcely understand. 
Arminius was no more at home in Geneva than 
in Rome; and his followers were prescribed by 
the most religious people of England, and so far 
as might be were driven from the realm. Calvin- 
ists and Lutherans felt as little inclination as 
Catholics to allow liberty of conscience to others ; 
and as grotesque a compromise as ever was made 
in matters religious was that made in Germany, 
when it was decided that the peoples of the various 
German principalities should in mass accept the 
faiths of their respective princes. 

Yet though the Reformers thus strove to estab- 
lish for their own use the very religious intolerance 
against which they had revolted, the mere fact of 



The Times and the Man 13 

their existence nullified their efforts. Sooner or 
later people who had exercised their own judg- 
ment, and had fought for the right to exercise it, 
were sure grudgingly to admit the same right 
in others. That time was as yet far distant. 
In Cromwell's youth all the leading Christian 
churches were fiercely intolerant. Unless we 
keep in mind that this was the general attitude, 
an attitude which necessarily affected even the 
greatest men, we cannot do justice to the political 
and social leaders of that age when we find them, 
as we so often do, adopting toward their religious 
foes policies from which we, of a happier age, 
turn with horror. 

In England hatred of Roman Catholicism had 
become almost interchangeable with hatred of 
Spain. Spain had been the one dangerous foe 
which England had encountered under the Tudor 
dynasty, and the only war she had ever waged 
into which the religious element entered was the 
war which put upon the English roll of honor the 
names of her great sixteenth-century seamen, 
Drake and Hawkins, Howard and Frobisher. 
Throughout the sixteenth century Spain had 
towered above every other power of Europe in 
warlike might ; and though the Dutch and Eng- 
lish sailors had broken the spell of her invinci- 
bility at sea, on shore her soldiers retained their 
reputation for superior prowess, in spite of the 



14 Oliver Cromwell 

victories of Maurice of Orange, until Gustavus 
Adolphus marched his wonderful army down from 
the frozen North. During Cromwell's youth and 
early manhood Spain was still the most powerful 
and most dreaded of European nations. Her 
government had become a mere tyranny; her 
religion fanatical bigotry of a type more extreme 
than any that existed elsewhere, even in an age 
when all creeds tended toward fanaticism and 
bigotry. It was in Spain that the Holy Inquisi- 
tion chiefly flourished — one of the most fearful 
engines for the destruction of all that was highest 
in mankind that the world has ever seen. Cath- 
olics were oppressed in England and Protestants 
in France; but in each country the persecuted 
sect might almost be said to enjoy liberty, and 
certainly to enjoy peace, when their fate was com- 
pared with the dreadful horrors of torture and 
murder with which Spain crushed out every 
species of heresy within her borders. Jew, Infidel, 
and Protestant, shared the same awful doom, until 
she had purchased complete religious uniformity 
at the price of the loss of everything that makes 
national life great and noble. The dominion of 
Spain would have been the dominion of deso- 
lation; her supremacy as baneful as that of the 
Turk; and Holland and England, in withstand- 
ing her, rendered the same service to humanity 
that was rendered at that very time by those 



The Times and the Man 15 

nations of southeastern Europe who formed out 
of the bodies of their citizens the bulwark which 
stayed the Turkish fury. 

But if in her relations to one Catholic nation 
England appeared as the champion of religious 
liberty, of all that makes life worth having to the 
free men who live in free nations, yet in her rela- 
tions to another Catholic people she herself played 
the role of merciless oppressor — religious, political, 
and social. Ireland, utterly foreign in speech and 
culture, had been ground into the dust by the 
crushing weight of England's overlordship. Dur- 
ing centuries chaos had reigned in the island ; the 
English intruders possessing sufficient power to 
prevent the development of any Celtic national 
life, but not to change it into a Norman or Eng- 
lish national life. The English who settled and 
warred in Ireland felt and acted as the most bar- 
barous white frontiersmen of the nineteenth cen- 
tury have acted toward the alien races with whom 
they have been brought in contact. There is no 
language in which to paint the hideous atrocities 
committed in the Irish wars of Elizabeth; and 
the worst must be credited to the highest English 
officials. In Ireland the antagonism was funda- 
mentally racial; whether the sovereign of Eng- 
land were Catholic or Protestant made little dif- 
ference in the burden of wrong which the Celt 
was forced to bear. The first of the so-called 



16 Oliver Cromwell 

plantations by which the Celts were ousted in 
mass from great tracts of country to make room 
for English settlers, was undertaken under the 
Catholic Queen Mary, and the two counties thus 
created by the wholesale expulsion of the wretched 
kerne were named in honor of the Queen and of 
her spouse, the Spanish Philip. Though Philip's 
bigotry made him the persecutor of heretics, it 
taught him no mercy toward those of his own 
faith but of a different nationality, whether Irish 
or Portuguese. When England became Prot- 
estant, Ireland stood steadfastly for the old faith ; 
and religious was added to race hatred. In Spain 
the Holy Inquisition was the handmaid of grind- 
ing tyranny. In Ireland the Catholic priesthood 
was the sole friend, standby, and comforter of a 
hunted and despairing people. In the Nether- 
lands and on the high seas Protestantism was the 
creed of liberty. In Ireland it was one of the 
masks worn by the alien oppressor. 

France was Catholic, but her Catholicism dif- 
fered essentially from that of Spain, and during 
the first part of the seventeenth century was quite 
as liberal as the Protestantism of England. When 
Cromwell was a child Henry of Navarre was on 
the French throne, and to him all creeds were 
alike. He was succeeded in the actual govern- 
ment of France by the great Cardinals Richelieu 
and Mazarin, who were statesmen rather than 



The Times and the Man 17 

churchmen ; and under them the French Prot- 
estants enjoyed rather more toleration than was 
allowed the Catholics of England. The natural 
foes of France were the two great Catholic powers 
of Spain and Austria, ruled by the twin branches 
of the House of Hapsburg; and her hostility to 
them determined her attitude throughout the 
Thirty Years' War. 

Meanwhile, Holland was at the height of her 
power. She had a far greater colonial empire than 
England, her commercial development was greater, 
and the renown of her war marine higher. Drake 
and Hawkins had but singed the beard of the 
Spanish king, had but plundered his vessels and 
harassed his great fleets. Van Heemskirk, Piet 
Hein, and the elder Tromp crushed the sea- 
power of Spain by downright hard fighting in 
great pitched battles, and captured her silver 
fleets entire. 

In Great Britain itself — it must be kept in 
mind that Scotland was as yet an entirely distinct 
kingdom, united to England only by the fact 
that the same line of kings ruled over both — the 
difference between the Scotch and the English, 
though less in degree, was the same in kind as 
that between the English and the Dutch. In 
Scotland, outside of the Highlands, the mass of 
the people were devoted with all the strength of 
their intense and virile natures to the form of 



18 Oliver Cromwell 

Calvinism introduced by Knox. Their Church 
government was Presbyterian. As both the Pres- 
byterian ministers and their congregations de- 
manded that the State should be managed in 
essentials according to the wishes of the Church, 
the general feeling was really in the direction of 
a theocratic republic, although the name would 
have frightened them. In Scotland, as in Eng- 
land, no considerable body of men had yet grasped 
the idea that there should be toleration of religious 
differences or a divorce between the functions of 
the State and the Church. In both countries, as 
elsewhere at the time through Christendom, reli- 
gious liberty meant only religious liberty for the 
sect that raised the cry; but, as elsewhere, the 
mere use of the name as a banner under which to 
fight brought nearer the day when the thing itself 
would be possible. 

In England there was practically peace during 
the first forty years of the century, but it was an 
ignoble and therefore an evil peace. Of course, 
peace should be the aim of all statesmen, and is 
the aim of the greatest statesman. Nevertheless, 
not only the greatest statesmen, but all men who 
are truly wise and patriotic, recognize that peace 
is good only when it comes honorably and is used 
for honorable purposes, and that the peace of 
mere sloth or incapacity is as great a curse as the 
most unrighteous war. Those who doubt this 



The Times and the Man 19 

would do well to study the condition of England 
during the reign of James I., and during the first 
part of the reign of Charles I. England had then 
no standing army and no foreign policy worthy of 
the name. The chief of her colonies was grow- 
ing up almost against her wishes, and wholly 
without any help or care from her. In short, she 
realized the conditions, as regards her relations 
with the outside world and "militarism," which 
certain philosophers advocate at the present day 
for America. The result was a gradual rotting 
of the national fiber, which rendered it necessary 
for her to pass through the fiery ordeal of the Civil 
War in order that she might be saved. 

In every nation there is, as there has been from 
time immemorial, a good deal of difficulty in 
combining the policies of upholding the national 
honor abroad, and of preserving a not too heavily 
taxed liberty at home. Many peoples and many 
rulers who have solved the problem with marked 
success as regards one of the two conditions, have 
failed as regards the other. It was the peculiar 
privilege of the Stuart kings to fail signally in 
both. They were dangerous to no one but their 
own subjects. Their government was an object 
of contempt to their neighbors and of contempt, 
mixed with anger and terror, to their own people. 
They made amends for utter weakness in the face 
of a foreign foe by showing against the free men 



2 o Oliver Cromwell 

of their own country that kind of tyranny which 
finds its favorite expression in oppressing those 
who resist not at all, or ineffectually. They were 
held on the throne only by a mistaken but hon- 
orable loyalty, and by an unworthy servility ; by 
the strong habits formed by the customs of cen- 
turies; and, most of all, by the wise distrust of 
radical innovation and preference for reform to 
revolution which gives to the English race its 
greatest strength. 

This last attitude, the dislike of revolution, 
was entirely wholesome and praiseworthy. On 
the other hand, the doctrine of the divine right 
of kings, which represented the extreme form of 
loyalty to the sovereign, was vicious, unworthy of 
the race, and to be ranked among degrading 
superstitions. It is now so dead that it is easy to 
laugh at it ; but it was then a real power for evil. 
Moreover, the extreme zealots who represented 
the opposite pole of the political and religious 
world, were themselves, as is ordinarily the case 
with such extremists, the allies of the forces 
against which they pretended to fight. From 
these dreamers of dreams, of whose "cloistered 
virtue" Milton spoke with such fine contempt, 
the men who possessed the capacity to do things 
turned contemptuously away, seeking practical 
results rather than theoretical perfection, and 
being content to get the substance at some cost 



The Times and the Man 21 

of form. As always, the men who counted were 
those who strove for actual achievement in the 
field of practical politics, and who were not mis- 
led merely by names. England, in the present 
century, has shown how complete may be the 
freedom of the individual under a nominal mon- 
archy ; and the Dreyfus incident in France would 
be proof enough, were any needed, that despotism 
of a peculiarly revolting type may grow rankly, 
even in a republic, if there is not in its citizens a 
firm and lofty purpose to do justice to all men 
and guard the rights of the weak as well as of the 
strong. 

James came to the throne to rule over a people 
steadily growing to think more and more seriously 
of religion; to believe more and more in their 
rights and liberties. But the King himself was 
cursed with a fervent belief in despotism, and an 
utter inability to give his belief practical shape in 
deeds. For half a century the spirit of sturdy 
independence had been slowly growing among 
Englishmen. Elizabeth governed almost under 
the forms of despotism; but a despotism which 
does not carry the sword has to accommodate 
itself pretty thoroughly to the desires of the sub- 
jects, once these desires become clearly defined 
and formulated. Elizabeth never ventured to do 
what Henry had done. She left England, there- 
fore, thoroughly Royalist, devoted to the Crown, 



22 Oliver Cromwell 

and unable to conceive of any other form of gov- 
ernment, but already desirous of seeing an in- 
crease in the power of the people as expressed 
through Parliament. James, from the very outset 
of his reign, pursued a course of conduct exactly 
fitted both to irritate the people with the pre- 
tensions of the Crown, and to convince them that 
they could prevent these pretensions from being 
carried out. 

Besides, he offended both their political and 
their religious feelings. England had been grow- 
ing more and more fanatically Protestant ; that is, 
more and more Puritan. Under Elizabeth there 
had been more religious persecution of Puritans, 
and of Dissenters generally, than of Catholics. 
But this could not prevent the growth of the spirit 
of Puritanism. During the reign of James there 
were marked Presbyterian tendencies visible 
within the Anglican Church itself, and plenty 
of Puritans among her divines. Unfortunately, 
both Presbyterian and Anglican were then as one 
in heartily condemning that spirit of true reli- 
gious liberty, of true toleration, which we of 
to-day in the United States recognize as the most 
vital of religious rights. The so-called Inde- 
pendent movement, from which sprang the Con- 
gregational and indeed the Baptist Churches as 
we know them to-day, had begun under Elizabeth. 
Its votaries contended for what now seems the 



The Times and the Man 23 

self-evident right of each congregation, if it so 
desires, to decide for itself important questions 
of doctrine and of church management. Yet 
Elizabeth's ministers had actually stamped this 
sect out of existence, with the hearty approval of 
the wisest men in the realm and of the enormous 
majority of the people. Such an act, and, above 
all, such approval, shows how long and difficult 
was the road which still had to be traversed 
before the goal of religious liberty was reached. 

The people were relatively less advanced 
toward religious than toward political liberty. 
Nevertheless, they were distinctly in advance of 
the King, even in matters religious. The reso- 
lute determination to fight for one's own liberty 
of conscience, when it once becomes the charac- 
teristic of the majority, cannot but tend toward 
securing liberty of conscience for all; whereas, 
for one man, who claims supremacy in the 
Church as well as overlordship in the State, to 
seek to impose his will upon others in matters 
both spiritual and political, cannot but produce a 
very aggravated form of tyranny. The Stuarts 
represented an extreme, reactionary type of king- 
ship ; a type absolutely alien to all that was high- 
est and most characteristic in the English charac- 
ter. They possessed the will to be despots, but 
neither their own powers nor the tendencies of 
the times were in their favor. The tendency 



24 Oliver Cromwell 

was, however, very strongly in favor of hereditary 
kingship; so strongly, indeed, that nothing but 
the extreme folly as well as the extreme base- 
ness of the Stuart kings could overcome it. 
Stability of government, and therefore order, 
depends in the last resort upon the ability of the 
people to come to a consensus as to where power 
belongs. This consensus is less a matter of 
volition than of long habit, of slow evolution ; to 
Americans of to-day, the rule of the majority 
seems part of the natural order of things, whereas 
to Russians it seems utterly unnatural, and they 
could by no possibility be brought into sudden 
acquiescence in it. To Englishmen, in the early 
decades of the seventeenth century, hereditary 
kingship seemed the only natural government, 
and they could be severed from this belief only 
by a succession of violent wrenches. 

James I. stood for absolutism in Church and 
State, and quarreled with and annoyed his sub- 
jects in the futile effort to realize his ideas. Charles 
I., whom James had vainly sought to marry to a 
Spanish princess, and succeeded in marrying to a 
French princess (Henrietta Maria), took up his 
father's task. In private life he was the best of 
the Stuart kings, reaching about the average level 
of his subjects. In public life his treachery, men- 
dacity, folly, and vindictiveness ; his utter inabil- 
ity to learn by experience or to sympathize with 



The Times and the Man 25 

any noble ambition of his country ; his readiness 
to follow evil counsel, and his ingratitude toward 
any sincere friend, made him as unfit as either of 
his sons to sit on the English throne ; and a greater 
condemnation than this it is not possible to award. 
Germany was convulsed by the Thirty Years' 
War : but Charles cared nothing for the struggle, 
and to her humiliation England had to see Sweden 
step to the front as the champion of the Refor- 
mation. At one period Charles even started to 
help the French king against the Huguenots, but 
was brought to a halt by the outburst of wrath 
this called forth from his subjects. Once he made 
feeble war on Spain, and again he made feeble 
war on France ; but the expedition he sent against 
Cadiz failed, and the expedition he sent to 
Rochelle was beaten ; and he was, in each case, 
forced to make peace without gaining anything. 
The renown of the English arms never stood 
lower than during the reigns of the first two 
Stuarts. 

At the outset of his reign Charles sought to 
govern through Buckingham, who was entirely fit 
to be his minister, and, therefore, unfit to be 
trusted with the slightest governmental task on 
behalf of a free and great people. Under Buck- 
ingham the grossest corruption obtained — not 
only in the public service, but in the creation of 
peerages. His whole administration represented 



26 Oliver Cromwell 

nothing but violence and bribery; and when he 
took command of the forces to be employed 
against Rochelle, he showed that the list of his 
qualities included complete military incapacity. 

It was after the failure at Rochelle that Charles 
summoned his third Parliament. With his first 
two he had failed to do more than quarrel, as they 
would not grant him supplies unless they were 
allowed the right to have something to say as to 
how they were to be used. He had, therefore, 
dissolved them, holding that their only function 
was to give him what may be needed. 

With his third Parliament he got on no better. 
In it two great men sprang to the front — Sir 
Thomas Went worth, afterward Lord Strafford, 
and Sir John Eliot, who had already shown him- 
self a leader of the party that stood for free repre- 
sentative institutions as against the unbridled 
power of the King. Eliot was a man of pure and 
high character, and of dauntless resolution, though 
a good deal of a doctrinaire in his belief that Par- 
liamentary government was the cure for all the 
evils of the body politic. Wentworth, dark, able, 
imperious, unscrupulous, was a born leader, but 
he had no root of true principle in him. At the 
moment, from jealousy of Buckingham, and from 
desire to show that he would have to be placated 
if the King were awake to self-interest, he threw 
all the weight of his great power on the popular 



The Times and the Man 27 

side. Instead of giving the King the money he 
wanted, Parliament formulated a Petition of 
Right, demanding such elementary measures of 
justice as that the King should agree never again 
to raise a forced loan, or give his soldiers free 
quarters on householders, or execute martial law 
in time of peace, or send whom he wished to 
prison without showing the cause for which it was 
done. The last was the provision against which 
Charles struggled hardest. The Star Chamber — 
a court which sat without a jury, and which was 
absolutely under the King's jurisdiction — had 
been one of his favorite instruments in working 
his arbitrary will. The powers of this court were 
left untouched by the Petition : yet even the ser- 
vice this court could render him was far less than 
what he could render himself if it lay in his power 
arbitrarily to imprison men without giving the 
cause. However, his need of money was so great, 
and the Commons stood so firm, that he had 
to yield, and on June 7, in the year 1628, the 
Petition of Right became part of the law of the 
land. The first step had been taken toward 
cutting out of the English Constitution the 
despotic powers which the Tudor kings had be- 
queathed to their Stuart successors. 

Immediately afterward Buckingham was assas- 
sinated by a soldier who had taken a violent 
grudge against him, and the nation breathed freer 



28 Oliver Cromwell 

with this particular stumbling-block removed, 
while it lessened the strain between the King and 
the Commons, who were bent on his impeach- 
ment. 

There were far more serious troubles ahead. If 
the King could raise money without summoning 
Parliament, he could rule absolutely. If Parlia- 
ment could control not only the raising, but the 
expenditure of money, it would be the supreme 
source of power, and the King but a figure-head ; 
in other words, the government would be put upon 
the basis on which it has actually stood during 
the present century. For many reigns the Com- 
mons had been accustomed to vote to each king 
for life, at the outset of his reign, the duties on 
exports and imports, known as tonnage and 
poundage ; but during the years immediately past 
men had been forced to think much on liberty 
and self-government. Parliament was in no mood 
to surrender absolute power to the King. 

With the right to lay taxes and to supervise 
the expenditure of money — that is, to conduct 
the government — was intertwined the question of 
religion. The mass of Englishmen adhered rather 
loosely to the Anglican communion, and were 
not extreme Puritans ; on certain points, however, 
they were tinged very deeply with Calvinism. 
They were greatly angered by the attitude of 
those bishops, who under the lead of Laud 



The Times and the Man 29 

showed themselves more hostile to Protestant 
than to Catholic dogmas. These bishops preached 
not only that the views in Church matters held 
by the bulk of Englishmen were wrong, but 
furthermore that it was the duty of every subject 
to render entire obedience to the sovereign, no 
matter what the sovereign did, and they insisted 
that parliaments were of right mere ciphers in the 
State. Such doctrines were not only irritating 
from the theological standpoint ; they also struck 
at the root of political freedom. The religious 
antagonism was accentuated by the fact that at 
this time the Protestant cause in Germany had 
touched the lowest point it ever reached during 
the Thirty Years' War, and the anger and alarm 
of the English Protestants, as they saw the Cal- 
vinists and Lutherans of Denmark and North Ger- 
many overcome, were heightened by the indiffer- 
ence, if not satisfaction, with which the King and 
the bishops looked at the struggle. 

In 1629 the Commons, under the lead of Eliot 
and Pym, took advanced ground alike on the 
questions of religion and of taxation. Pym was 
supplementing Eliot's work, which was to make 
the House of Commons the supreme authority in 
England, by striving to associate together a 
majority of the members for the achievement of 
certain common objects ; in other words, he was 
laying the foundation of party government. 



30 Oliver Cromwell 

Under the lead of these two men, the first two 
Parliamentary and popular leaders in the modern 
sense, the House of Commons passed resolutions 
demanding uniformity in religious belief through- 
out the kingdom and condemning every innovation 
in religion, and declaring enemies to the kingdom 
and traitors to its liberties whoever advised the 
levying of tonnage and poundage without the 
authority of Parliament, or whoever voluntarily 
paid those duties. The first clause hit Catholics 
and Dissenters alike, but was especially aimed at 
the bishops and their followers, who stood closest 
to the King; and the second was, of course, in- 
tended to transfer the sovereignty from the King 
to Parliament — in other words, from the King to 
the people. Charles met the challenge by dis- 
solving Parliament. Eleven years were to pass 
before another met. Meantime, the King gov- 
erned as a despot; and it must be remembered 
that when he deliberately chose thus to govern as 
a despot, responsible to no legal tribunal, he at 
once threw his subjects back on the only remedies 
which it is possible to enforce against despotism — 
deposition or death. 

Charles was bitterly angry at the sturdy inde- 
pendence shown by the Commons, and marked 
out for vengeance those who had been fore- 
most in thwarting his wishes. His course was 
easy. The Petition of Right formulated a prin- 



The Times and the Man 31 

ciple, but as yet it offered no safeguard against 
an unscrupulous king; while the Star Chamber 
court, and the other judges for that matter, held 
office at his pleasure, and acted as his subservient 
tools in fining and imprisoning merchants who 
refused payment of the duties, or men whose acts 
or words the King chose to consider seditious. 
Eliot and some of his fellow-members were 
thrown into prison because of the culminating 
proceedings in Parliament. Eliot's comrades 
made submission and were released, but Eliot 
refused to acknowledge that the King, through 
his courts, had any right to meddle with what 
was done in Parliament. He took his stand 
firmly on the ground that the King was not the 
master of Parliament, and of course this could 
but mean ultimately that Parliament was master 
of the King. In other words, he was one of the 
earliest leaders of the movement which has pro- 
duced English freedom and English government 
as we now know them. He was also its martyr. 
He was kept in the Tower without air or exer- 
cise for three years, the King vindictively refus- 
ing to allow the slightest relaxation in his con^ 
finement, even when it brought on consumption. 
In December, 1632, he died; and the King's 
hatred found its last expression in denying to 
his kinsfolk the privilege of burying him in his 
Cornish home. 



32 Oliver Cromwell 

Charles set eagerly to work to rule the kingdom 
by himself. To the Puritan dogma of enforced 
unity of religious belief — utterly mischievous, and 
just as much fraught with slavery to the soul in 
one sect as another — he sought, through Laud, to 
oppose the only less mischievous, because silly, 
doctrine of enforced uniformity in the externals 
of public worship. Laud was a small and narrow 
man, hating Puritanism in every form, and perse- 
cuting bitterly every clergyman or layman who 
deviated in any way from what he regarded as 
proper ecclesiastical custom. His tyranny was 
of that fussy kind which, without striking terror, 
often irritates nearly to madness. He was Charles's 
instrument in the effort to secure ecclesiastical 
absolutism. 

The instrument through which the King sought 
to establish the royal prerogative in political 
affairs was of far more formidable temper. Im- 
mediately after the dissolution of Parliament 
Wentworth had obtained his price from the King, 
and was appointed to be his right-hand man in 
administering the kingdom. A man of great 
shrewdness and insight, he seems to have strug- 
gled to govern well, according to his lights; but 
he despised law and acted upon the belief that 
the people should be slaves, unpermitted, as they 
were unfit, to take any share in governing them- 
selves. After a while Laud was made archbishop; 



The Times and the Man 33 

and Went worth was later made Lord Strafford. 
Went worth and Laud, with their associates, 
when they tried to govern on such terms, were 
continually clashing with the people. A govern- 
ment thus carried on naturally aroused resistance, 
which often itself took unjustifiable forms; and 
this resistance was, in its turn, punished with re- 
volting brutality. Criticism of Laudian methods, 
or of existing social habits, might take scurrilous 
shape; and then the critic's ears were hacked off 
as he stood in the pillory, or he was imprisoned 
for life. The great fight was made, not on a relig- 
ious, but on a purely political question — that of 
Ship Money. The King wished to go to war with 
the Dutch, and to raise his fleet he issued writs, 
first to the maritime counties, and then to every 
shire in England. He consulted his judges, who 
stated that his action was legal: as well they 
might, for when a judge disagreed with him on 
any important point, he was promptly dismissed 
from office. But there was one man in the king- 
dom who thought differently, John Hampden, a 
Buckinghamshire 'squire, who had already once 
sat as a silent member in Parliament, together with 
another equally silent member of the same social 
standing, his nephew, Oliver Cromwell. Hamp- 
den was assessed at twenty shillings. The amount 
was of no more importance than the value of the 
tea which a century and a half later was thrown 
3 



34 Oliver Cromwell 

into Boston Harbor ; but in each case a vital prin- 
ciple — the same vital principle — was involved. 
If the King could take twenty shillings from 
Hampden without authority from the representa- 
tives of the people in Parliament assembled, then 
his rule was absolute: he could do what he 
pleased. On the other hand, if the House of 
Commons could do as it wished in granting 
money only for whatever need it chose to recog- 
nize in the kingdom, then the House of Commons 
was supreme. In Hampden's view but one course 
was possible — he was for the Parliament and the 
nation against the King; and he refused to pay 
the sum, facing without a murmur the punish- 
ment for his contumacy. 

The King and his ministers did not flinch from 
proceeding to any length against either political 
or religious opponents. Charles heartily upheld 
Laud and Wentworth in carrying out their policy 
of "thorough"; Laud in England; Wentworth, 
after 1633, in Ireland. "Thorough," in their 
sense of the word, meant making the State, which 
was the King, paramount in every ecclesiastical 
and political matter, and putting his interests 
above the interests, the principles, and the preju- 
dices of all classes and all parties ; paying heed to 
nothing but to what seemed right in the eyes of 
the sovereign and the sovereign's chosen advisers. 
Under Wentworth 's strong hand a certain amount 



The Times and the Man 35 

of material prosperity followed in Ireland, although 
chiefly among the English settlers. There was 
no such material prosperity in England; 1630, 
for instance, was a famine year. The net effect 
of the policy would in the long run have been to 
bring down a freedom-loving people to a lower 
grade of political and social development. There 
was, of course, no oppression in England in any 
way resembling such oppression as that which 
flogged the Dutch to revolt against the Spaniards. 
But it was exactly the kind of oppression which 
led, in 1776, to the American Revolution. Eliot, 
Hampden, and Pym, stood for the principles that 
were championed by Washington, Patrick Henry, 
and the Adamses. The grievances which forced 
the Long Parliament to appeal to arms were like 
those which made the Continental Congress throw 
off the sovereignty of George III. In neither 
case was there the kind of grinding tyranny which 
has led to the assassination of tyrants and the 
frantic, bloodthirsty uprising of tortured slaves. 
In each case the tyranny was in its first stage, not 
its last ; but the reason for this was simply that a 
nation of vigorous freemen will always revolt by 
the time the first stage has been reached. It was 
not possible, either for the Stuart kings or for 
George III., to go beyond a certain point, for as 
soon as that point was reached the freemen were 
called to arms by their leaders. 



36 Oliver Cromwell 

However, there was the greatest reluctance 
among Englishmen to countenance rebellion, even 
for the best of causes. This reluctance was emi- 
nently justifiable. Rebellion, revolution — the ap- 
peal to arms to redress grievances; these are 
measures that can only be justified in extreme 
cases. It is far better to suffer any moderate evil, 
or even a very serious evil, so long as there is a 
chance of its peaceable redress, than to plunge the 
country into civil war ; and the men who head or 
instigate armed rebellions for which there is not 
the most ample justification must be held as one 
degree worse than any but the most evil tyrants. 
Between the Scylla of despotism and the Charybdis 
of anarchy there is but little to choose; and the 
pilot who throws the ship upon one is as blame- 
worthy as he who throws it on the other. But a 
point may be reached where the people have to 
assert their rights, be the peril what it may ; and 
in Great Britain this point was passed under 
Charles I. 

The first break came, not in England, but in 
Scotland. The Scotch abhorred Episcopacy; 
whereas the English had no objection whatever 
to bishops, so long as the bishops did not outrage 
the popular religious convictions. In Scotland 
the spirit of Puritanism was uppermost, and was 
already exhibiting both its strength and its weak- 
ness ; its sincerity and its lack of breadth ; its 



The Times and the Man 37 

stern morality and its failure to discriminate 
between essentials and non-essentials ; its loftiness 
of aim and its tendency to condemn liberality of 
thought in religion, art, literature, and science, 
alike as irreligious ; its insistence on purity of life, 
and yet its unconscious tendency to promote 
hypocrisy and to drive out one form of religious 
tyranny merely to erect another. 

A man of any insight would not have striven 
to force an alien system of ecclesiastical govern- 
ment upon a people so stubborn and self-reliant, 
who were wedded to their own system of religious 
thought. But this was what Laud attempted, with 
the full approval of Charles. In 1637 he made a 
last effort to introduce the ceremonies of the Eng- 
lish Church at Edinburgh. No sooner was the 
reading of the Prayer-Book begun than the con- 
gregation burst into wild uproar, execrating it as 
no better than celebrating mass. It was essentially 
a popular revolt. The incident of Jenny Geddes's 
stool may be mythical, but it was among the 
women and men of the lower orders that the 
resistance was stoutest. The whole nation re- 
sponded to the cry, and hurried to sign a national 
Covenant, engaging to defend the Reformed reli- 
gion, and to do away with all ' 'innovations" ; that is, 
with everything in which Episcopacy differed from 
Puritanism and inclined toward the Church of 
Rome. In England and Scotland alike the Church 



38 Oliver Cromwell 

of Rome was still accepted by the people at large 
as the most dangerous of enemies. The wonderful 
career of Gustavus Adolphus had just closed. 
The Thirty Years' War — the last great religious 
struggle — was still at its height. If, in France, 
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew stood far in the 
past, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes yet 
lay in the future. The after-glow of the fires of 
Smithfield still gleamed with lurid light in each 
somber Puritan heart. The men who, in England, 
were most earnest about their religion held to 
their Calvinistic creed with the utmost sincerity, 
high purpose, and self-devotion : but with no little 
harshness. Theirs was a lofty creed, but one 
which, in the revolt against levity and viciousness, 
set up a standard of gloom ; and, though ready to 
fight to the death for liberty for themselves, they 
had as yet little idea of tolerating liberty in others. 
Naturally, such men sympathized with one an- 
other, and the action of the Scotch was heartily, 
though secretly, applauded by the stoutest Pres- 
byterians of England. Moreover, while menaced 
by the common oppressor, the Puritan independ- 
ents, who afterward split off from the Presby- 
terians, made common cause with them, the irrec- 
oncilable differences between the two bodies not 
yet being evident. 

Soon the Scotch held a general assembly of the 
Church, composed of both clerical and lay mem- 



The Times and the Man 39 

bers, and formally abolished Episcopacy, in spite 
of the angry protests of the King. Their action 
amounted in effect to establishing a theocracy. 
They repudiated the unlimited power of the King 
and the bishops, as men would do nowadays in like 
case ; but they declared against liberty of thought 
and conduct in religious matters, basing their 
action on practically the same line of reasoning 
that influenced the very men they most denounced, 
hated, and feared. 

The King took up the glove which the Scotch 
had thrown down. He raised an army and un- 
dertook the first of what were derisively known 
as the "Bishops' Wars." But his people sympa- 
thized with the Scotch rather than with him. He 
got an army together on the Border, but it would 
hot fight, and he was forced reluctantly to treat 
for peace. Then Strafford came back from Ire- 
land and requested Charles to summon a Parlia- 
ment so that he could get funds. In April, 1640, 
the Short Parliament came together, but the Eng- 
lish spirit was now almost as high as the Scotch 
in hostility to the King, and Parliament would 
not grant anything to the King until the griev- 
ances of the people were redressed. To this 
demand Charles would not listen, and the Parlia- 
ment was promptly dissolved. Then, being 
heartened by Laud, and especially by Strafford, 
Charles renewed the war, only to see his army 



40 Oliver Cromwell 

driven in headlong panic before the Scotch at 
Newburn. The result was that he had to try to 
patch up a peace under the direction of Strafford. 
But the Scotch would not leave the kingdom until 
they were paid the expenses of the war. There 
was no money to pay them, and Charles had to 
summon Parliament once more. On November 3, 
1640, the Long Parliament met at Westminster. 

When Oliver Cromwell took his seat in the 
Long Parliament he was forty-one years old. He 
had been born at Huntingdon on April 25, 1599, 
and by birth belonged to the lesser gentry, or 
upper middle-class. The original name of the 
family had been Williams ; it was of Welsh origin. 
There were many Cromwells, and Oliver was a 
common name among them. One of the Pro- 
tector's uncles bore the name, and remained a 
stanch Loyalist throughout the Civil War. Oli- 
ver's own father, Robert, was a man in very 
moderate circumstances, his estate in the town of 
Huntingdon bringing an income of some £300 a 
year. Oliver's mother, Elizabeth Steward of Ely, 
seems to have been of much stronger character 
than his father. The Stewards, like the Crom- 
wells, were "new people," both families, like so 
many others of the day, owing their rise to the 
spoliation of the monasteries. Oliver's father was 
a brewer, and his success in the management of 
the brewery was mainly due to Oliver's mother. 



The Times and the Man 41 

No other member of Oliver's family — neither his 
wife nor his father — influenced him as did his 
mother. She was devoted to him, and he, in turn, 
loved her tenderly and respected her deeply. He 
followed her advice when young; he established 
her in the Royal Palace of Whitehall when he 
came to greatness ; and when she died he buried 
her in Westminster Abbey. As a boy he received 
his education at Huntingdon, but when seventeen 
years old was sent to Cambridge University. A 
strong, hearty young fellow; fond of horse-play 
and rough pranks — as indeed he showed himself 
to be even when the weight of the whole kingdom 
rested on his shoulders. He nevertheless seems to 
have been a fair student, laying the foundation 
for that knowledge of Greek literature and the 
Latin language, and that fondness for books, 
which afterward struck the representatives of the 
foreign powers at London. In 161 7 his father 
died, and he left Cambridge. When twenty-one 
years old he was married in London, to Elizabeth 
Bouchier (who was one year older than he was), 
the daughter of a rich London furrier. She was a 
woman of gentle and amiable character, and 
though she does not appear to have influenced 
Cromwell's public career to any perceptible 
extent, he always regarded her with fond affec- 
tion, and was always faithful to her. 

For twenty years after his marriage he lived a 



42 Oliver Cromwell 

quiet life, busying himself with the management 
of his farm. Nine children were born to him, of 
whom three sons and five daughters lived to 
maturity. About this time his soul was first 
deeply turned toward religious matters, and, like 
the great majority of serious thinkers of the time, 
he became devoted to the Puritan theology; 
indeed no other was possible to a representative 
of the prosperous, independent, and religious 
middle-class, from which all the greatest Puritan 
leaders sprang. While a boy Oliver had been 
sent to the free school at Huntingdon, and his first 
training had been received under its master, the 
Reverend Thomas Beard, a zealous Puritan and 
Reformer, as well as a man of wide reading and 
sound scholarship, and lastly, an inflamed hater 
of the Church of Rome. All his surroundings, all 
his memories, were such as to make the future 
Dictator of England sincerely feel that the Church 
of Rome was the arch-antagonist of all, temporal 
and spiritual, that he held most dear. In the first 
place his ancestors were among those who had 
profited by the spoliation of the monasteries ; and 
the only way to avoid uncomfortable feelings on 
the part of the spoiler is for him to show — or if 
this is not possible, to convince himself that he 
has shown — the utmost iniquity on the part of the 
despoiled. When Oliver was a small boy the 
Gunpowder Plot shook all England. When he 



The Times and the Man 43 

was a little older Henry of Navarre was stabbed 
in Paris; and though Henry was a cynical turn- 
coat in matters of religion, and a man of the most 
revolting licentiousness in private life, he was yet 
a great ruler of men, and had been one of the 
props of the Protestant cause. Before Oliver 
came of age the Thirty Years' War had begun 
its course. To Oliver Cromwell, warfare against 
the Church of Rome, broken by truces which, 
whether long or short, were intended only to be 
breathing-spells, must have seemed the normal 
state of things. 

In 1 63 1 Oliver sold his paternal estate in 
Huntingdon and managed a rented farm at St. 
Ives for five years ; then he removed to Ely, in the 
fen country, and again took up farming, being 
joined by his mother and sisters. He served in 
the great Parliament which passed the Petition of 
Right, but played no part of prominence therein ; 
standing stoutly, however, for Puritanism and 
Parliamentary freedom. During the ensuing 
eleven years of unrest, while all England was 
making ready for the impending conflict, Oliver 
busied himself with his farm and his family. He 
showed himself one of the strongest bulwarks of 
the Puritan preachers ; zealous in the endeavor to 
further the cause of religion in every way, and 
always open to appeals from the poor and 
the oppressed, of whom he was the consistent 



44 Oliver Cromwell 

champion. When certain rich men, headed by the 
Earl of Bedford, endeavored to oust from some 
of their rights the poor people of the fens, Oliver 
headed the latter in their resistance. He was 
keenly interested in the trial of his kinsman, John 
Hampden, for refusal to pay the Ship Money; a 
trial which was managed by the advocate Oliver 
St. John, his cousin by marriage. 

In short, Cromwell was far more concerned in 
righting specific cases of oppression than in ad- 
vancing the great principles of constitutional gov- 
ernment which alone make possible that orderly 
liberty which is the bar to such individual acts 
of wrong-doing. From the standpoint of the pri- 
vate man this is a distinctly better failing than is 
its opposite ; but from the standpoint of the states- 
man the reverse is true. Cromwell, like many a 
so-called "practical " man, would have done better 
work had he followed a more clearly defined 
theory; for though the practical man is better 
than the mere theorist, he cannot do the highest 
work unless he is a theorist also. However, all 
Cromwell's close associations were with Hampden, 
St. John, and the other leaders in the movement 
for political freedom, and he acted at first in entire 
accord with their ideas: while with the religious 
side of their agitation he was in most hearty 
sympathy. 

It is difficult for us nowadays to realize how 



The Times and the Man 45 

natural it seemed at that time for the Word of 
the Lord to be quoted and appealed to on every 
occasion, no matter how trivial, in the lives of 
sincerely religious men. It is very possible that 
quite as large a proportion of people nowadays 
strive to shape their internal lives in accordance 
with the Ten Commandments and the Golden 
Rule ; indeed, it is probable that the proportion is 
far greater ; but professors of religion then carried 
their religion into all the externals of their lives. 
Cromwell belonged among those earnest souls 
who indulged in the very honorable dream of a 
world where civil government and social life alike 
should be based upon the Commandments set 
forth in the Bible. To endeavor to shape the 
whole course of individual existence in accord- 
ance with the hidden or half-indulged law of 
perfect righteousness, has to it a very lofty side; 
but if the endeavor is extended to include man- 
kind at large, it has also a very dangerous side : so 
dangerous indeed that in practice the effort is apt 
to result in harm, unless it is undertaken in a 
spirit of the broadest charity and toleration ; for 
the more sincere the men who make it, the more 
certain they are to treat, not only their own prin- 
ciples, but their own passions, prejudices, vanities, 
and jealousies, as representing the will, not of 
themselves, but of Heaven. The constant appeal 
to the Word of God in all trivial matters is, more- 



46 Oliver Cromwell 

over, apt to breed hypocrisy of that sanctimonious 
kind which is peculiarly repellent, and which in- 
variably invites reaction against all religious feel- 
ing and expression. 

At that day Cromwell's position in this matter 
was, at its worst, merely that of the enormous 
majority of earnest men of all sects. Each sect 
believed that it was the special repository of the 
wisdom and virtue of the Most High: and the 
most zealous of its members believed it to be their 
duty to the Most High to make all other men 
worship Him according to what they conceived 
to be His wishes. This was the medieval atti- 
tude, and represented the medieval side in Puri- 
tanism ; a side which was particularly prominent 
at the time, and which, so far as it existed, marred 
the splendor of Puritan achievement. The noble- 
ness of the effort to bring about the reign of God 
on earth, the inspiration that such an effort was to 
those engaged in it, must be acknowledged by 
all; but, in practice, we must remember that, as 
religious obligation was then commonly construed, 
it inevitably led to the Inquisition in Spain; to 
the sack of Drogheda in Ireland ; to the merciless 
persecution of heretics by each sect, according to 
its power, and the effort to stifle freedom of 
thought and stamp out freedom of action. It is 
right, and greatly to be desired, that men should 
come together to search after the truth : to try to 



The Times and the Man 47 

find out the true will of God; but in Cromwell's 
time they were only beginning to see that each 
body of seekers must be left to work out its own 
beliefs without molestation, so long as it does not 
strive to interfere with the beliefs of others. 

The great merit of Cromwell, and of the party 
of the Independents which he headed, and which 
represented what was best in Puritanism, consists 
in the fact that he and they did, dimly, but with 
ever-growing clearness, perceive this principle, 
and, with many haltings, strove to act up to it. 
The Independent or Congregational churches, 
which worked for political freedom, and held that 
each congregation of Protestants should decide 
for itself as to its religious doctrines, stood as the 
forerunners in the movement that has culminated 
in our modern political and religious liberty. How 
slow the acceptance of their ideas was, how the 
opposition to them battled on to the present cen- 
tury, will be appreciated by anyone who turns to 
the early writings of Gladstone when he was the 
"rising hope of those stern Tories," whose special 
antipathy he afterward became. Even yet there 
are advocates of religious intolerance, but they are 
mostly of the academic kind, and there is no 
chance for any political party of the least impor- 
tance to try to put their doctrines into effect. 
More and more, at least here in the United States, 
Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, are 



48 Oliver Cromwell 

learning the grandest of all lessons — that they can 
best serve their God by serving their fellow-men, 
and best serve their fellow-men, not by wrangling 
among themselves, but by a generous rivalry in 
working for righteousness and against evil. 

This knowledge then lay in the future. When 
Cromwell grew to manhood he was a Puritan of 
the best type, of the type of Hampden and Milton ; 
sincere, earnest, resolute to do good as he saw it, 
more liberal than most of his fellow-religionists, 
and saved from their worst eccentricities by his 
hard common-sense, but not untouched by their 
gloom, and sharing something of their narrowness. 
Entering Parliament thus equipped, he could not 
fail to be most drawn to the religious side of the 
struggle. He soon made himself prominent; a 
harsh-featured, red-faced, powerfully-built man, 
whose dress appeared slovenly in the eyes of the 
courtiers — who was no orator, but whose great 
power soon began to impress friends and enemies 
alike. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND THE CIVIL WAR. 

KING CHARLES'S theory was that Parlia- 
ment had met to grant him the money- 
he needed. The Parliament's conviction 
was that it had come together to hold the King 
and his servants to accountability for what they 
had done, and to provide safeguards against a 
repetition of the tyranny of the last eleven years. 
Parliament held the whip hand, for the King 
dared not dissolve it until the Scots were paid, 
lest their army should march at once upon London. 
The King had many courtiers who hated popu- 
lar government, but he had only one great and 
terrible man of the type that can upbuild tyran- 
nies; and, with the sure instinct of mortal fear 
and mortal hate, the Commons struck at the min- 
ister whose towering genius and unscrupulous 
fearlessness might have made his master absolute 
on the throne. A week after the Long Parlia- 
ment met, in November, 1640, Pym, who at once 
took the lead in the House, moved the impeach- 
ment of Strafford, in a splendid speech which set 
forth the principles for which the popular party 
was contending. It was an appeal from the rule 
of irresponsible will to the rule of law, for the vio- 
4 49 



\ 



50 Oliver Cromwell 

lation of which every man could be held account- 
able before some tribunal. About the same time 
Laud was thrown into the Tower; but at the 
moment there was no thought of taking his life, 
for the ecclesiastic was not — like the statesman — a 
mighty and fearsome figure, and though he had 
done as much evil as his feeble nature permitted, 
he had unquestionably been far more conscientious 
than the great Earl. Strafford had sinned against 
the light, for he had championed liberty until 
the King paid him his price and made him the 
most dangerous foe of his former friends. He 
now defended himself with haughty firmness, and 
the King strove in every way to help him. But 
the Commons passed a Bill of Attainder against 
him : and then Charles committed an act of fatal 
meanness and treachery. There was not one 
thing that Strafford had done, save by his sov- 
ereign's wish and in his sovereign's interest. By 
every consideration of honor and expediency 
Charles was bound to stand by him. But the 
Stuart King flinched. Deeming it for his own 
interest to let Strafford be sacrificed, he signed 
the death-warrant. "Put not your trust in 
Princes," said the fallen Earl when the news was 
brought to him, and he went to the scaffold 
undaunted. 

Cromwell showed himself to be a man of mark 
in this Parliament; but he was not among the 



The Long Parliament 51 

very foremost leaders. He had no great under- 
standing of constitutional government, no full 
appreciation of the vital importance of the reign 
of law to the proper development of orderly 
liberty. His fervent religious ardor made all 
questions affecting faith and doctrine close to 
him ; and his hatred of corruption and oppression 
inclined him to take the lead whenever any ques- 
tion arose of dealing, either with the wrongs done 
by Laud in the course of his religious persecutions, 
or with the irresponsible tyranny of the Star 
Chamber, and the sufferings of its victims. The 
bent of Cromwell's mind was thus shown right in 
the beginning of his Parliamentary career. His 
desire was to remedy specific evils. He was too 
impatient to found the kind of legal and constitu- 
tional system which could alone prevent the recur- 
rence of such evils. This tendency, thus early 
shown, explains, at least in part, why it was that 
later he deviated from the path trod by Hampden, 
and afterward by Washington and Washington's 
colleagues: showing himself unable to build up 
free government or to establish the reign of law, 
until he was finally driven to substitute his own 
personal government for the personal government 
of the King whom he had helped to dethrone, 
and put to death. Cromwell's extreme admirers 
treat his impatience of the delays and short- 
comings of ordinary constitutional and legal pro- 



52 Oliver Cromwell 

ceedings as a sign of his greatness. It was just 
the reverse. In great crises it may be necessary 
/to overturn constitutions and disregard statutes, 
; just as it may be necessary to establish a vigilance 
committee, or take refuge in lynch law ; but such a 
remedy is always dangerous, even when absolutely 
necessary ; and the moment it becomes the habit- 
ual remedy, it is a proof that society is going 
backward. Of this retrogression the deeds of the 
strong man who sets himself above the law may 
be partly the cause and partly the consequence; 
but they are always the signs of decay. 

The Commons had passed a law authorizing 
the election of a Parliament at least once in three 
years : which at once took away the King's power 
to attempt to rule without a Parliament ; and in 
May they extorted from the King an act that they 
should not be dissolved without their own con- 
sent. Ship Money was declared to be illegal ; the 
Star Chamber was abolished; and Tonnage and 
Poundage were declared illegal, unless levied by 
Act of Parliament. Then the Scotch army was 
paid off and returned across the Border. The best 
work of the Commons had now been done, and if 
they could have trusted the King it would have 
been well for them to dissolve; but the King 
could not be trusted, and, moreover, the religious 
question was pushed to the front. Laud's actions 
— actions taken with the full consent and by the 



The Long Parliament 53 

advice of the King — had rendered the Episcopal 
form of Church government obnoxious. The 
House of Commons was Presbyterian, and it 
speedily became evident that it wished to estab- 
lish" the Presbyterian system of Church govern- 
ment in the place of Episcopacy; and, moreover, 
that it intended to be just as intolerant on behalf 
of Presbyterianism as the King and Laud had 
been on behalf of Episcopacy. There was a strong 
moderate party which the King might have rallied 
about him, but his incurable bad faith made it 
impossible to trust his protestations. He now 
made terms with the Scotch, in accordance with 
which they agreed not to interfere between him- 
self and his English subjects in religious matters. 
He hoped thereby to deprive the Presbyterian 
English of their natural allies across the Border. 
This conduct, of itself, would have inflamed the 
increasing religious bitterness; but it was raised 
to madness by the news that came from Ireland 
at this time. 

Inspired by the news of the revolt in Scotland 
and the troubles in England, the Irish had risen 
against their hereditary oppressors. It was the 
revolt of a race which rose to avenge wrongs as 
bitter as ever one people inflicted upon another; 
and it was inevitable that it should be accom- 
panied by appalling outrages in certain places. 
It was on these outrages that the English fixed 



54 Oliver Cromwell 

their eyes, naturally ignoring the generations of 
English evil-doing which had brought them about. 
A furious cry for revenge arose. Every Puritan, 
from Oliver Cromwell down, regarded the mas- 
sacres as a fresh proof that Roman Catholics ought 
to be treated, not as professors of another Chris- 
tian creed, but as cruel public enemies ; and their 
burning desire for vengeance took the form, not 
merely of hostility to Roman Catholicism, but to 
the Episcopacy, which they regarded as in the last 
resort an ally of Catholicism. 

In November, 1641, the Puritan majority in 
Parliament passed the Grand Remonstrance — 
which was a long indictment of Charles's conduct. 
Cromwell had now taken his place as among the 
foremost of the Root and Branch Party, who 
demanded the abolition of Episcopacy, and whose 
action drove all those who believed in the Episco- 
pal form of Church government into the party of 
the King. He threw himself with eager vehem- 
ence into the Party of the Remonstrance, and 
after its bill was passed told Falkland that if 
it had been rejected by Parliament he would 
have sold all he had, and never again seen Eng- 
land. 

For a moment the Puritan violence, which cul- 
minated in the Grand Remonstrance, provoked a 
reaction in favor of the King; but the King, by 
another act of violence, brought about a counter- 



The Long Parliament 55 

reaction. In January, 1642, he entered the 
House of Commons, and in person ordered the 
seizure and imprisonment in the Tower of the 
five foremost leaders of the Puritan party, in- 
cluding Pym and Hampden. Such a course on 
his part could be treated only as an invitation 
to civil war. London, which before had been 
wavering, now rallied to the side of the Commons ; 
the King left Whitehall; and it was evident to 
all men that the struggle between him and the 
Parliament had reached a point where it would 
have to be settled by the appeal to arms. 

In August, 1642, King Charles planted the 
royal standard on the Castle of Nottingham, and 
the Civil War began. The Parliamentary forces 
were led by the Earl of Essex. They included 
some twenty regiments of infantry and seventy- 
five troops of horse, each sixty strong, raised and 
equipped by its own captain. Oliver Cromwell 
was captain of the Sixty-seventh Troop, and his 
kinsfolk and close friends were scattered through 
the cavalry and infantry. His sons served with 
or under him. One brother-in-law was quarter- 
master of his own troop ; a second was captain of 
another troop. His future son-in-law, Henry 
Ireton, was captain of yet another; a cousin and 
a nephew were cornets. Another cousin, John 
Hampden, was colonel of a regiment of foot; so 
was Cromwell's close friend and neighbor, the 



56 Oliver Cromwell 

after-time Earl of Manchester, who was much 
under his influence. 

It was nearly a hundred years since England 
had been the scene of serious fighting, and Scot- 
land had witnessed nothing more than brawls 
during that time. Elizabeth's war with Spain 
had been waged upon the ocean. However, 
thousands of English and Scotch adventurers 
had served in the Netherlands and in High 
Germany under the Dutch and Swedish generals. 
In both the Royal and Parliamentary armies 
there was a sprinkling of men — especially in the 
upper ranks of the officers — who had had prac- 
tical experience of war on a large scale. The 
English people offered exceptionally fine material 
for soldiers; the population was still overwhelm- 
ingly rural and agricultural. In the cities the 
hardy mechanics and craftsmen were accustomed 
to sports in which physical prowess played a 
great part. The agricultural classes were far 
above the peasant serfs of Germany and France; 
and the gentry and yeomanry were accustomed 
to the use of the horse and the fowling-piece, and 
were devoted to field-sports. In courage, in 
hardihood, in intelligence, the level was high. 

Although gunpowder had been in use for a 
couple of centuries, progress toward the modern 
arms of precision had been so slow that close- 
quarter weapons were still, on the whole, superior ; 



The Long Parliament 57 

and shock tactics rather than fire tactics were 
decisive. Artillery, though used on the field of 
battle, was never there a controlling factor, being 
of chief use in the assault of fortified places. The 
musketeers took so long to load their clumsy 
weapons that they could be used to best advan- 
tage only when protected, and they played a less 
important part on a pitched field than the great 
bodies of pikemen with which they were mingled. 
In England the cavalry had completely the upper 
hand of the infantry. It was used, not merely 
to finish the fight, but to smash unbroken and 
unshaken bodies of foot; and so great was its 
value in the open field that every effort was made 
by the commanders on both sides to keep it at 
the largest possible ratio to the whole army. 
Every decisive battle of the Civil War was made 
such by the cavalry. The arrangement of the 
armies was, invariably, with the infantry in the 
center, the pikemen and the musketeers ordinarily 
alternating in clumps, while the cavalry was on 
both wings. The dragoons, though mounted, 
habitually fought on foot with their fire-pieces. 
Lancers were rarely used. The heavy cavalry 
were clad in cuirasses, and armed with long, 
straight swords and pistols. The light cavalry 
usually wore the buff coat, sometimes with a 
breast-piece, always with a helmet ; and in addi- 
tion to their sword and pistols, carried a carbine. 



58 Oliver Cromwell 

Throughout Europe, at this time, cavalry- 
trusted altogether too much to their clumsy fire- 
arms, save when handled by some great natural 
leader of horse ; and, in consequence, on the Con- 
tinent, the infantry had won the upper hand. 
But it happened in the English Civil War that 
the only great leaders developed were cavalrymen ; 
and so the horse retained throughout the mastery 
over the foot ; although, as each arm was always 
pitted against the same arm in the opposing forces, 
the struggle frequently wore itself out before the 
victorious horse and victorious foot, if they be- 
longed to different parties, could fight it out 
between them. 

The Civil War opened with just such blunder- 
ing and indecisive fighting as marked the opening 
of the American Civil War two centuries later. 
There was no hard and fast line, whether geo- 
graphically or of caste, between the two parties; 
in every portion of England, and in every rank 
of society, there were to be found adherents both 
of the King and of the Commons ; but, as a whole, 
the east and south of England were for the Par- 
liament ; the north and west were Royalist. The 
bulk of the aristocracy stood for the King; the 
bulk of the lesser gentry and yeomanry were 
against him. The revolutionary movement — as 
in America in 1776 — received its main strength 
from the lesser gentry, small farmers, tradesmen, 



The Long Parliament 59 

and upper-class mechanics and handicraftsmen. 
In America in 1776 there was no proletariat. So 
far as there was one in England in 1642, it took 
no interest in the struggle. The peasantry, the 
mass of the agricultural laborers, were inclined 
toward the King, though the men immediately 
above them in social position, who represented 
the lowest rank that had political influence, were 
the other way. The townsmen were generally 
for the Parliament. 

In comparing the English Civil War of the 
seventeenth century with the American Civil 
War of the nineteenth, there are some curious 
points of similarity, no less than some very sharp 
contrasts. During the two centuries there had 
been a great growth in esteem for fixity of prin- 
ciple. In the English Civil War nothing was 
more common than for a man to change sides, 
and there was treachery even on the field of battle 
itself; whereas, in the American Civil War, 
though many of the leaders, like Lee and Thomas, 
were in great doubt as to the proper course to 
follow, yet when sides had once been taken, there 
was no flinching and no looking back. Moreover, 
there was far greater intensity of popular feeling 
in the American Civil War ; even the States that 
were divided in opinion at the outset held no 
considerable mass of population which did not 
soon throw its weight on one side or the other; 



60 Oliver Cromwell 

whereas, in the English Civil War there were 
large bodies of men who strove to avoid declaring 
for either side. At the very end of the contest, 
tens of thousands of persons, mainly peasants, 
organized under the title of Clubmen, with the 
avowed purpose of holding the scales even 
between the two sets of combatants, and of 
looking out for their own interests. The Ameri- 
can Civil War was fought for the right of secession, 
and efforts were made — in Kentucky, for in- 
stance — to establish the right of a locality to be 
neutral. The "state rights" theory reached an 
almost equal development in some of the English 
counties during the Cromwellian contest. York- 
shire at one time declared for neutrality. The 
trained bands of Cornwall, when the Royalist 
forces were driven back within their borders, 
promptly turned out and drove off the pursuing 
Parliamentarians, but refused to obey orders to 
leave the county in pursuit of their foes, and 
disbanded to their own homes. Later, they 
repeated exactly the same course of procedure. 
There were at times local truces, or agreements 
as to the conditions of the contest in particular 
localities. 

On both sides "associations" were formed, 
consisting of special groups of counties banded 
together intimately for the purposes of defense. 
The most important of these, the Eastern Associa- 



The Long Parliament 61 

tion, included Cromwell's own home, taking in 
all of the middle East. This region was through- 
out the contest the backbone of resistance to 
the King. Its people were strongly Puritan in 
feeling, and it was they who gave Cromwell his 
strength: for they gave him his Ironsides; and 
furnished the famous New Model for the Parlia- 
mentary army which finished the war. 

At the outset of the war many of the nobles 
raised regiments from among their own tenants, 
and the armies were of picturesque look, each 
regiment having its own uniform. The Guards 
of Lord Essex adopted the buff leather coat, 
which afterward became the uniform of the whole 
Roundhead army. Hampden's regiment was in 
green ; the London trained bands in bright scarlet. 
Other regiments were clad in blue or gray. In 
the Cavalier army there were foot-guards in white 
and foot-guards in red; and among their horse, 
the Life Guards of the King — composed of lords 
and gentlemen who had no separate commands — 
wore plumed casques over their long curled locks, 
embroidered lace collars over their glittering cui- 
rasses, gay scarfs, gilded sword-belts, and great- 
boots of soft leather doubled down below the 
knee. 

The history of the English Civil War, like the 
history of the American Revolutionary War and 
the American Civil War, teaches two lessons. 



62 Oliver Cromwell 

First, it shows that the average citizen of a civil- 
ized community requires months of training 
before he can be turned into a good soldier, and 
that raw levies — no matter how patriotic — are, 
under normal conditions, helpless before smaller 
armies of trained and veteran troops, and cannot 
strike a finishing blow even when pitted against 
troops of their own stamp. In the second place 
it teaches a lesson, which at first sight seems con- 
tradictory of the first, but is in reality not in the 
least so ; namely, that there is nothing sacrosanct 
in the trade of the soldier. It is a trade which 
can be learned without special difficulty by any 
man who is brave and intelligent, who realizes 
the necessity of obedience, and who is already 
gifted with physical hardihood and is accustomed 
to the use of the horse and of weapons, to endur- 
ing fatigue and exposure, and to acting on his 
own responsibility, taking care of himself in the 
open. 

Cromwell's troops were not regulars, like the 
professional soldiers of the Thirty Years' War; 
they were volunteers. After two or three years' 
service they became the finest troops that Europe 
could then show; just as by 1864 the volunteers 
of Grant and Lee had reached a grade of per- 
fection which made them, for their own work, 
superior to any other of the armies then in exist- 
ence. 



The Long Parliament 63 

Under modern conditions, in a great civilized 
state, the regular army is composed of officers 
who have as a rule been carefully trained to their 
work; who possess remarkably fine physique, 
and who are accustomed to the command of 
men and to taking the lead in emergencies; and 
the enlisted men have likewise been picked out 
with great care as to their bodily development; 
have been drilled until they handle themselves, 
their horses, and their weapons admirably, can 
cook for themselves, and are trained to the en- 
durance of hardship and exposure under the con- 
ditions of march and battle. An ordinary volun- 
teer or militia regiment from an ordinary civilized 
community, on the other hand, no matter how 
enthusiastic or patriotic, or how intelligent, is 
officered by lawyers, merchants, business men, or 
their sons, and contains in its ranks clerks, me- 
chanics, or farmers' lads of varying physique, who 
have to be laboriously taught how to shoot and 
how to ride, and, above all, how to cook and to 
take care of themselves and make themselves 
comfortable in the open, especially when tired 
out by long marches, and when the weather 
is bad. At the outset such a regiment is, of 
course, utterly inferior to a veteran regular regi- 
ment, but after it has been in active service in 
the field for a year or two, so that its weak men 
have been weeded out, and its strong men have 



64 Oliver Cromwell 

learned their duties — which can be learned far 
more rapidly in time of war than in time of peace — 
it becomes equal to any regiment. Moreover, if 
a regular regiment consists of raw recruits and 
is officered by men who have learned their profes- 
sion only in the barracks and the study and on 
the parade ground, it may be a cause of very 
disagreeable surprise to those who have grown 
to regard the word "regular" as a kind of fetish. 
Again, a volunteer regiment may have the wis- 
dom to select officers for the highest positions who 
know how to handle men, who have seen actual 
soldiering, who possess natural capacity for leader- 
ship, eagerness to learn, and the good sense to 
know their own shortcomings ; and the rank and 
file may be men of adventurous temper, already 
skilful riflemen, and of great bodily hardihood, 
accustomed to exposure, accustomed to cook — . 
that is to say, to take care of their stomachs — to 
live in the open, to endure hardship and fatigue, 
and to take advantage of cover in battle. Such a 
regiment, especially if raised on the frontier, may, 
from the outset, prove itself equal to or better 
than any ordinary regular regiment — as has 
recently been shown by our troops in the Philip- 
pines, by the Australians and Canadians in South 
Africa, and, above all, by the Boers ; and as was 
shown nearly a century ago by Hofer's Tyrolese 
and Andrew Jackson's backwoodsmen. Of course, 



The Long Parliament 65 

no good traits will avail in the least if men are 
possessed with the belief that they cannot be 
taught anything, if they are not eager to obey and 
to learn ; or if they do not possess a natural fight- 
ing edge. 

So it is with the men high in command. The 
careful training in body and mind, and especially 
in character, gained in an academy like West 
Point, and the subsequent experience in the field, 
endow the regular officer with such advantages 
that, in any but a long war, he cannot be over- 
taken even by the best natural fighter. In the 
American Civil War, for instance, the greatest 
leaders were all West Pointers. Yet even there, 
by the end of the contest both armies had pro- 
duced regimental, brigade, and division com- 
manders, who though originally from civil life, 
had learned to know their business exactly as 
well as the best regular officers ; and there was at 
least one such commander — Forrest — who, in his 
own class, was unequaled. If in a war the regu- 
lar officers prove to have been trained merely to 
the pedantry of their profession, and do not hap- 
pen to number men of exceptional ability in their 
ranks, then sooner or later the men who are born 
soldiers will come to the front, even though they 
have been civilians until late in life. 

None of the men on the Parliamentary side 
who had received their training in the Continental 
5 



66 Oliver Cromwell 

armies amounted to much. On the Royalist side 
the only professional soldier who made his mark 
was Rupert ; and Rupert, after a year or two, was 
decisively beaten by Cromwell — a great natural 
military genius, who, although a civilian till after 
forty, showed an astonishing aptitude in grasping 
the essentials of his new profession. His only 
military rival in the war was Montrose, who was 
also not a professional soldier. 

In September King Charles had gathered a force 
of 10,000 men at Nottingham, while Essex was 
getting together a larger army not far off, at 
Northampton. The wealth of the kingdom was 
with the Parliament, which also possessed the 
arsenal, the fleet, and the principal ports. On 
the other hand, man for man, the King's troops 
were superior to the Parliament's, especially in 
the most dreaded arm of the service, the horse. 
The fervid zealots who, like John Bunyan, en- 
tered the Parliamentary army, were never in the 
majority, and needed peculiar training to bring 
out their remarkable soldierly qualities. The 
sober, thrifty, religious middle class — which was 
the backbone of the Parliamentary strength — had 
no special aptitude for military service. If its 
members could once be put in the army and kept 
there a sufficient length of time, their qualities 
made them excellent soldiers; but, as a whole, 
they were not men of very adventurous temper, 



The Long Parliament 67 

and had had no such training in arms, or in the 
sports akin to war, as inclined them to rush into 
the army. On the other hand, the Royalist nobles 
and squires, and their gamekeepers, grooms, and 
hard-riding kinsmen, with their taste for field- 
sports, their love of adventure, and their high 
sense of warlike honor, made splendid material 
out of which to organize an army, and especially 
cavalry. In consequence, for the first half of the 
war the Royalist cavalry was overwhelmingly 
superior to the Parliamentary cavalry, composed 
as it was of men bought with the money of the 
bourgeoisie, who had no particular heart in their 
work; who were timid horsemen and unskilled 
swordsmen. The difference in favor of the Royal- 
ist horse was as marked as the superiority of the 
Confederate horse in the American Civil War, 
under leaders like Stuart, Morgan, and Basil Duke ; 
until time was afforded, in the one case for the 
growth of Cromwell, in the other for the develop- 
ment of leaders like Sheridan and Wilson. 

Cromwell had already shown himself very active, 
He had seized the magazine of the Castle of Cam- 
bridge, and secured the University plate, which 
was being sent to the King. He had raised vol- 
unteers and expended money freely out of his 
own scanty means. His troop of horse was, from 
the beginning, utterly different from most of the 
Parliamentary cavalry; it was composed of his 



68 Oliver Cromwell 

own neighbors, yeomen and small farmers, hard, 
serious men, whose grim natures were thrilled by 
the intense earnestness of their leader, and whom 
he steadily drilled into good horsemanship and 
swordsmanship. His chaplains always played an 
important part; one of them, Hugh Peters, was 
a man of mark, who joined ability to high char- 
acter. 

The King's cavalry was led by Prince Rupert, a 
dashing swordsman and horseman, a born cavalry 
leader, who, though only twenty-three, had 
already learned his trade in the wars of the Con- 
tinent. Rupert opened the real righting, scatter- 
ing a large body of Parliamentary horse in panic 
rout when he struck them near Powick, on the 
Severn. 

In October the King marched on London, and 
at Edgehill met the army of Essex. Each side 
drew up, with the infantry in the center, the 
cavalry on the flanks. On the King's side there 
was much jealousy among the different generals, 
and some insubordination, but far more activity 
and eagerness for fight than the Parliamentary 
troops displayed. The battle was fought on the 
afternoon of October 23, and the Parliamentary 
army was demoralized at the outset by the 
treacherous desertion of a regiment commanded 
by a man most inappropriately named Sir Faithful 
Fortescue. He moved out of the ranks and joined 



The Long Parliament 69 

Rupert's horse. Rupert charged with headlong 
impetuosity, and by his fury and decision so over- 
awed the Parliamentary horse opposed to him 
that they did not wait the shock, but galloped 
wildly off, actually dispersing the nearest infantry 
regiments of their own side. Rupert then showed 
the characteristic shortcoming which always im- 
paired the effect of his daring prowess. He never 
could keep his men in hand after they had scat- 
tered the foe; he never kept a sufficient reserve 
with which to meet a counter-stroke. None but 
a great master of war could withstand his first 
shock ; but after the first shock he was no longer 
dangerous. At Edgehill his horse followed the 
routed left wing of the Parliamentarians until 
they became as completely scattered as their 
beaten foes. He struck the Parliamentary bag- 
gage-train, which was defended by Hampden 
with a couple of infantry regiments, and his 
scattered troopers were beaten back when he 
attempted to take it. 

Meanwhile, the Royalist horse of the left wing 
had fallen with the same headlong fury on the 
Parliamentary right, but had only struck a small 
portion of the Parliamentary cavalry. These they 
drove in rout before them, themselves following 
in hot pursuit. The result was, that the bulk 
of the Parliamentary foot, and a portion of the 
right wing of the Parliamentary horse, including 



70 Oliver Cromwell 

Oliver Cromwell's troop, were left face to face 
with the Royalist foot, which was inferior in 
numbers; and falling on it, after a desperate 
struggle they got the upper hand and forced it 
back. Rupert at last began to gather his horse 
together to face the victorious Roundhead foot; 
and as night fell, the two armies were still fronting 
each other. The King advanced on London in 
November, but was unable to force his way into 
the city, and fell back. 

The war had not opened well for the Parlia- 
mentary side, and their especial weakness was 
evidently in cavalry — the arm by which decisive 
battles in the open field were won. Cromwell, 
with unerring eye, saw the weakness and started 
to remedy it. It is about this time that his 
famous conversation with Hampden took place. 
Said Cromwell: "Your troops are most of them 
old decayed serving-men and tapsters, and such 
kind of fellows ; and their troops are gentlemen's 
sons, younger sons, and persons of quality ; do you 
think that the spirits of such base, mean fellows 
will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that 
have honor and courage and resolution in them? 
. . . You must get men of a spirit; and take it 
not ill what I say — I know you will not — of a 
spirit that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen 
will go, or else you will be beaten still. ... I 
raised such men as had the fear of God before 



The Long Parliament 71 

them, as made some conscience of what they did, 
and from that day forward they were never 
beaten." 

The famous Presbyterian clergyman, Baxter, 
who was by no means friendly to Cromwell, 
described his special care to get religious men into 
his troop; men of greater intelligence than com- 
mon soldiers, who enlisted, not for the money, but 
from an earnest sense of public duty. Naturally, 
said Baxter, these troopers "having more than 
ordinary wit and resolution had more than ordi- 
nary success." 

By another writer of the time, Cromwell's horse 
are described as "freeholders and freeholders' sons, 
who upon matter of conscience engaged in this 
quarrel ; and thus being well-armed within by the 
satisfaction of their own consciences, and without 
by good iron arms, they would as one man stand 
firmly and charge desperately." Cromwell at once 
distinguished himself among his contemporaries, 
alike by the absolute obedience he rendered to 
his superiors, and by the incessant, unwearying 
activity with which he drilled his men in the use 
of their weapons and horses. He was speedily 
promoted to a colonelcy. In a news-letter of the 
time his regiment was described as composed of 
"brave men; well disciplined. No man swears 
but he pays his twelvepence; if he be drunk he 
is set in the stocks or worse; if one calls the 



72 Oliver Cromwell 

other Roundhead, he is cashiered ; insomuch that 
the counties where they come leap for joy of them, 
and come in and join with them. How happy 
were it if all the forces were thus disciplined!" 
Cromwell suppressed all plundering with an iron 
hand. An eminently practical man, not in the 
least a theoretical democrat, but imbued with 
that essence of democracy which prompts a man 
to recognize his fellows for what they really are, 
without regard to creed or caste, it speedily be- 
came known that under him anyone would have 
a fair show according to his merits. He realized 
to the full that the quality of troops was of vastly 
more consequence than their numbers ; that only 
the best men can be made the best soldiers ; and 
these best men themselves will make but poor 
soldiers unless they have good training. His 
troops proved what iron discipline, joined to stern 
religious enthusiasm, could accomplish ; just as 
later their immense superiority to the forces of the 
Scotch Covenanters showed that religious and 
patriotic enthusiasm, by itself, is but a poor sub- 
stitute for training and discipline. In one of his 
letters he writes : "I beseech you, be careful what 
captains of horse you choose ; what men be 
mounted. A few honest men are better than 
numbers. Some time they must have for exer- 
cise. If you choose godly, honest men to be 
captains of horse, honest men will follow them, 



The Long Parliament 73 

and they will be careful to mount such. I had 
rather have a plain russet-coated captain that 
knows what he rights for, and loves what he 
knows, than that which you call a gentleman, and 
is nothing else. I honor a gentleman that is so 
indeed. ... It may be it provoked some spirit 
to see such plain men made captains of horse. . . . 
Better plain men than none; but best to have 
men patient of work, faithful and conscientious 
in employment." 

Ordinarily, Cromwell was able to get for his 
leaders men who were gentlemen in the technical 
sense of the term, but again and again there 
forged to the front under him men like Pride, 
whose natural talents had to supply the place of 
birth and breeding. He writes again: "My 
troops increase; I have a lovely company; you 
would respect them did you know them. . . . 
They are honest, sober Christians; they expect 
to be used as men." Again he writes, when his 
Presbyterian colleagues were showing a tendency 
to oppress and drive out of the army men whose 
religious beliefs did not square with theirs: 
" Surely, you are not well-advised thus to turn off 
one so faithful to the cause, and so able to serve 
you as this man (a certain colonel). Give me 
leave to tell you I cannot be of your judgment. 
If a man notorious for wickedness, for oaths, for 
drinking, hath as great a share in your affection 



74 Oliver Cromwell 

as one who fears an oath, who fears to sin. . . . 
Ay, but the man is an 'Anabaptist'! Are you 
sure of that? Admit he be, shall that render 
him incapable to serve the public ? Sir, the state, 
in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of 
their opinions: if they be willing faithfully to 
serve it, that satisfies. . . . Take heed of being 
sharp or too easily sharpened by others, against 
those to whom you can object little, but that they 
square not with you in every opinion concerning 
matters of religion." 

In these sentences lies the justification of gen- 
uine democracy, of genuine religious liberty, and 
toleration by the state of religious differences. 
They were uttered by a man far in advance of the 
temper of his age. He was not sufficiently ad- 
vanced to extend his toleration to Roman Catho- 
lics, and even extending it as far as he did he 
was completely out of touch with the majority of 
his fellow-countrymen ; for the great bulk — both 
Episcopalians and Presbyterians — were bitterly 
hostile to the toleration of even inconsiderable 
differences of doctrine and ritual. The ideal after 
which Cromwell strove, though lower than that to 
which we of a more fortunate age have attained, 
was yet too high to be reached in his day. Never- 
theless, it was a good thing to have the standard 
set up; and once the mark which he had estab- 
lished was reached, it was certain that the spirit 



The Long Parliament 75 

of toleration would go much farther. As soon 
as Baptists and Congregationalists, no less than 
Episcopalians and Presbyterians, were tolerated 
by the state for the reasons he gave, it was sure to 
become impossible to refuse toleration to Catho- 
lics and Unitarians. 

We must honor Cromwell for his aspirations 
toward the ideal, but we must acknowledge how 
far short of reaching it he fell. At this very time 
he was handling without gloves the Episcopalian 
clergy. In order to secure the assistance of the 
Scotch, Parliament had determined to take the 
Covenant, which made the state religion of Eng- 
land the same form of lofty, but intolerant, Pres- 
byterianism that obtained in Scotland. Under 
the decision of the Government the ritual of the 
Church of England was forcibly suppressed, and 
there was no little harrying of Episcopal clergy 
and vandal destruction of ancient art symbolism 
by the Puritan zealots. "Leave off your fooling 
and come down, sir!" said Cromwell, walking 
into Ely Cathedral, where the clergyman had 
persisted in the choir service; and there was no 
choice but to obey. 

In 1643 Cromwell forged to the front as almost 
the only steadily successful Parliamentary com- 
mander. To marvelous energy, fervid zeal, great 
resourcefulness, fertility of invention, and indi- 
vidual initiative, he added the unerring insight 



76 Oliver Cromwell 

of the born cavalry leader. He soon saw that 
the true weapon of the cavalryman was the horse ; 
and, discarding the carbines with which his troop 
had first been armed, he taught them to rely upon 
the shock of a charging, close-knit mass of men 
and horses trained to move rapidly as a unit. 

He was ceaseless in his efforts to get his men 
paid, fed, and equipped. Like his great friend, 
Sir Thomas Fairfax, though he stopped all plun- 
dering, he levied heavy fines on the estates of the 
Royalists, and by these means, and by assessments 
from the Association, and by voluntary loans and 
contributions, he was able to keep his men well 
equipped. 

There was no comprehensive strategy in the 
fighting this year ; but the balance of the isolated 
expeditions undertaken inclined in favor of the 
King. Cromwell appears clearly, for the first 
time, as a successful military leader in May, near 
Grantham. He had under him twelve troops. 
The Cavaliers much outnumbered him. Never- 
theless, when, after some preliminary firing from 
the dragoons on both sides, Cromwell charged at 
a round trot, the Cavaliers, instead of meeting the 
charge, received it and were broken and routed. 
The fight was of great value as being the first in 
which the Parliamentary horse beat a superior 
number of Royalist horse. Cromwell was as yet 
learning his trade. On this occasion he hesitated 



The Long Parliament 77 

a long time about charging, and only charged at 
all when it became evident that his opponents 
would not ; and he owed his victory to the incom- 
petence of the Royalist commander. It was an 
invaluable lesson to him. 

A great deal of scrambling, confused, and 
rather pointless warfare followed. Rupert and 
Hampden encountered each other, and Hampden 
was defeated and killed. Hampden's great col- 
league, Pym, died later in the year, just after 
having brought about the league with Scotland — 
one of the first-fruits of which was the trial and 
execution of Laud. Presbyterianism was now 
dominant, and set itself to enforce everywhere 
the rigid rule of clerical orthodoxy. Against this 
the Independents began to raise their voices ; but 
the real force which was to gain them their vic- 
tory over both Royalist and Presbyterian was as 
yet hidden. Cromwell's Ironsides — as they were 
afterward termed when Rupert christened Crom- 
well himself by that name — the regiments which 
he raised and drilled after his own manner from 
the Eastern Association, these represented the 
real power of the Independents, and these were 
not yet recognized as the heart and right arm of 
the army. 

Cromwell held Nottingham, where the Royal- 
ists attacked him and he beat them off. He took 
Burleigh House, which was held by a strong 



78 Oliver Cromwell 

Royalist garrison; then, in July, 1643, ^ e a( i- 
vanced to rescue the Parliamentary general, Lord 
Willoughby, who was besieged at Gainsborough 
by a division of Newcastle's army. About a 
mile and a half out of town he met the cavalry 
of Lord Cavendish, which was drawn up at the 
top of a hill. To attack him it was necessary to 
advance up steep slopes, honeycombed by rabbit 
burrows; but Cromwell's squadrons were already 
remarkable alike for flexibility and steadiness, 
and their leader knew both how to prepare his 
forces and how to take daring advantage of every 
opportunity that offered. As his leading troops 
struggled to the top of the hill Cavendish's horse- 
men advanced, but the Cromwellian troopers, 
closing up, charged them at once. There was a 
stiff contest, but as the rest of the Parliamentary 
troops came to the front, the Royalists were over- 
thrown and driven off in wild rout. Cavendish 
himself brought up his reserve and routed a 
portion of the Parliamentary forces; but Crom- 
well had neither lost his head nor let his force 
get out of hand. He, too, had a reserve, and 
with this he charged Cavendish and overthrew 
him, Cavendish himself being slain. 

This feat was succeeded by another quite as 
notable. After relieving the town and giving 
Lord Willoughby powder and provisions, Crom- 
well advanced toward some Royalist soldiers who 



The Long Parliament 79 

still remained in view, about a mile distant. To 
his astonishment, these proved to be the vanguard 
of Newcastle's whole army, and there was nothing 
for it but to retreat. Cromwell's troops were 
tired, and only his excellent generalship and in- 
domitable courage prevented a disastrous rout. 
Both the Parliamentary horse and foot were at 
first shaken by the advance of the fresh Royalist 
soldiery, but Cromwell speedily got them in hand 
and retired by divisions, making head against the 
enemy alternately with one body of horse and then 
with another, while the rest of the troops drew 
back behind the shield thus afforded them. The 
alternating squadrons of the rear-guard always 
made head against the enemy and checked him, 
but always slipped away before he could charge, 
and thus the tired army was brought off in 
safety. 

In September Cromwell joined Sir Thomas 
Fairfax; and in October they met and over- 
threw a Royalist force at Winceby, the Puritan 
troopers singing a psalm as they advanced to the 
combat. The numbers seem to have been about 
equal, perhaps 3,000 a side. The battle began 
with a skirmish between the dragoons of the two 
forces. It was decided by the tremendous charge 
of Cromwell's steel-clad troopers. The charge 
was made at the trot, Cromwell leading his men. 
The Royal dragoons fired upon them as they came 



80 Oliver Cromwell 

on, Cromwell's horse was killed, and a Cavalier 
knocked him down as he rose, but was himself 
killed by a Puritan trooper. Cromwell sprang to 
his feet, flung himself on a fresh horse, and again 
joined in the fight. His troops were heavy cavalry, 
cuirassiers, and the opposing Royalists, with only 
buff coats, were overthrown by the shock of his 
advance. Fairfax charged in flank, and the rout 
was complete. The Royalist leaders chronicled 
with astonishment the fact that the Parliamentary 
horse showed great superiority — that they were 
"very good and extraordinarily armed." Appar- 
ently the victory was owing to the excellent drill- 
ing of Cromwell's troops, which enabled them to 
charge knee to knee; and when thus charging, 
the weight of the horses and of the iron-clad men 
made them irresistible. 

In 1644 t ne war at first dragged on as a series 
of isolated expeditions and fights in which neither 
side was able to score any decided advantage. 
Rupert performed two or three brilliant feats ; the 
Scotch crossed the border to aid the Parliamen- 
tarians; and Charles tried to come to some un- 
derstanding with the Irish, by which they would, 
if possible, furnish him troops, and if not, would 
at least free the English troops in Ireland. Some 
of the latter he did bring over. After one or two 
successes a body of them were captured and many 
subscribed to the Covenant. The most noted 



The Long Parliament 81 

man who thus changed sides was the aftertime 
general, George Monk. 

Cromwell was looming up . steadily ; not only 
for the discipline of his men, but for the vigilant 
way in which he kept touch with the enemy and 
gained information about them, making the best 
possible use of pickets, outposts, and scouting 
parties; all, by the way, being, as was usual in 
those times, under the headship of an officer 
known as the Scout-master — a far better term 
than the cumbrous modern "Chief of the Bureau 
of Intelligence." Of course Cromwell's growing 
military reputation added greatly to his weight in 
Parliament, of which, like most of the leading 
generals, he was still a member. His first feat 
during this year showed how little the duties of 
the soldier and the statesman were as yet differ- 
entiated. 

Early in January he appeared in the House of 
Commons, charged Lord Willoughby with mis- 
conduct, and brought about his removal and the 
naming of Manchester to the sole command in 
the seven associated counties. Manchester was 
little more than a figure-head. He made Crom- 
well his lieutenant-general and yielded in all 
things to him, until he was alienated by falling 
under the control of the Scotch Covenanters, who 
already hated Cromwell as a representative of the 
"sectaries" whom they persecuted. The House 
6 



82 Oliver Cromwell 

of Commons appointed a Committee of Both King- 
doms to assume the supreme executive authority 
for the conduct of the war. Cromwell was made 
a member of this Committee, and was also the 
ruling member of the Committee of the Eastern 
Association, which furnished the zealously Puritan 
force that was already the mainspring of the Par- 
liamentary army. 

In June the Scotch, under the Earl of Leven, 
and the English, under Lord Fairfax and Lord 
Manchester, were besieging York, which was de- 
fended by Lord Newcastle. Toward the very 
last of the month Rupert marched rapidly to its 
relief. The three Parliamentary generals fell back 
instead of falling on him as he advanced. New- 
castle wished to leave them alone, but Rupert in- 
sisted upon following and attacking the Parlia- 
mentary armies. He and Newcastle had about 
20,000 men. The Parliamentarians probably num- 
bered some 25,000; but throughout this war it 
is impossible to give either the numbers or the 
losses with accuracy. 

On July 2 Rupert overtook the end of the Par- 
liamentary column, which was saved from disaster 
only by the fortunate fact that the horse of Crom- 
well and Sir Thomas Fairfax formed the rear- 
guard. The two latter sent on word of Rupert's 
advance, warning the Parliamentary generals that 
they could not now avoid a fight ; and promptly 



The Long Parliament 83 

the Scotch and English troops were turned to face 
their Royalist foes on Marston Moor. 

A ditch stretched across the moor, and the 
armies drew up with this extending for most of its 
length between them. Each side was marshaled 
in the usual order — infantry in the center, cavalry 
on the flanks. The horse of the Parliamentary 
right wing was commanded by Sir Thomas Fair- 
fax, who had under him his own English cavalry 
and three Scottish regiments. The right wing of 
the foot was commanded by Lord Fairfax, and 
consisted of the Yorkshire troops and two bri- 
gades of Scots. The center, with its reserve, con- 
sisted of Scotch troops ; the left, of the infantry of 
the Eastern Association. Leven was with the 
infantry of the center; Manchester on his left. 
The horse of the left wing were under Cromwell, 
his Ironsides occupying the front line with three 
Scotch regiments in reserve. 

In the Royalist army the horse on the left wing 
were under Goring; the infantry in the center 
were under Newcastle, and Rupert himself led 
the horse of the right wing. At last the two great 
cavalry leaders of the war — Rupert and Crom- 
well — were to meet face to face. The war had 
lasted nearly two years. The best troops, under 
the best leaders, had reached very nearly their 
limit of perfectibility ; they were veterans, soldiers 
in every sense. 



84 Oliver Cromwell 

Hour after hour passed while the armies stood 
motionless, the leaders on either side anxiously 
scanning the enemy, seeking to find a weak point 
at which to strike. Evening drew on and no 
move was made. The Royalist leaders made up 
their mind that the battle would not be fought 
that day. Suddenly, at seven o'clock, the whole 
Parliamentary army moved forward, the Puritan 
troopers chanting a psalm, according to their wont. 

On the right, Fairfax's troopers, as they ad- 
vanced, were thrown into disorder. Goring 
charged them furiously, drove them back on the 
reserve of Scotch cavalry, and overthrew them all. 
The rout was hopeless, and the flying horsemen 
carried away the Yorkshire foot with them. Sir 
Thomas kept the ground, with a few of his troop- 
ers and a large number of Lord Balgony's Scotch 
Lancers and the Earl of Eglinton's Scotch Cuiras- 
siers. The fugitives were followed in hot pursuit 
by Goring, but part of his horse were kept in hand 
by their commander, Sir Charles Lucas, who, 
wheeling to the right, charged the flank of the 
Scotch foot, who had formed the Parliamentary 
center, and who had now crossed the ditch and 
were attacking the Royalists in front. The Scotch 
fought with stubborn valor, repulsing Lucas again 
and again, but suffering so heavily themselves that 
it became evident that they could not long stand, 
the combined front and flank attack. 



The Long Parliament 85 

While disaster had thus overtaken the Parlia- 
mentary right, on the left Cromwell had com- 
pletely the upper hand. His steel-clad troopers 
crashed into Rupert's horsemen at full speed. The 
fight was equal for some time, neither stubborn 
Roundhead nor gallant Cavalier being able to 
wrest the mastery from the other. But Rupert, 
who always depended upon one smashing blow, 
and put his main force into his front line, did not, 
like Cromwell, understand how best to use a re- 
serve. Cromwell's reserve — the Scotch cavalry — 
came up and charged home, and the Royalist 
horse were overthrown with the shock. "God 
made them as stubble to our swords," said Crom- 
well. 

Sending his leading troops in pursuit, to pre- 
vent the enemy from rallying, Cromwell instantly 
gathered the bulk of his horse and fell on the 
right wing of the Royalist foot — already hard 
pressed by the foot of the Eastern Association. 
The King's men fought with dogged courage, most 
conspicuous among them being Newcastle's own 
Northumbrian regiment, the famous Whitecoats, 
who literally died as they stood in the ranks. 

Sweeping down the line the Ironsides smashed 
one regiment after another, until, in the fading 
summer evening, Cromwell had almost circled the 
Royalist army, and came to their left wing, where 
he saw the Royalist horse charging the right flank 



86 Oliver Cromwell 

of the Scots and harrying the routed Yorkshire 
foot. Immediately he reformed his thoroughly 
trained squadrons almost on the same ground 
where Goring' s horse stood at the beginning of 
the battle, and fronting the same way. The foot 
of the Association formed beside them, and just 
before nightfall the Puritan cavalry and infantry 
made their final charge. Goring's troopers were 
returning from their pursuit; Lucas's men were 
recoiling from their last charge, in which Lucas 
himself had been captured. They were scattered 
like chaff by the shock of the steel-clad Crom- 
wellian troopers, riding boot to boot; and the 
remaining Royalist foot shared the same fate. 
The battle was over just as night fell, stopping all 
pursuit. But there was little need of pursuit. As 
at Waterloo, the very obstinacy with which the 
fight had been waged made the overthrow all the 
more complete when at last it came. Night went 
down on a scene of wild confusion, with thousands 
of fugitives from both armies streaming off the field 
through the darkness ; for the disaster to the right 
wing of the Parliamentary army had resulted not 
only in the rout of all the Yorkshire men and half 
of the Scotch, but also in the three Parliamentary 
commanding generals, Leven, Manchester, and 
Lord Fairfax, being swept off in the mass of fugi- 
tives. The fight had been won by Cromwell, not 
only by the valor, coolness, keen insight, and 



The Long Parliament 87 

power of control over his men, which he had 
showed in the battle itself, but by the two years 
of careful preparation and drill which had tem- 
pered the splendid weapons he used so well. 

This was the first great victory of the war ; but 
it produced no decisive effect; for there was no 
one general to take advantage of it. York 
fell; but little else resulted from the triumph. 
Fairfax, Manchester, and Leven all separated to 
pursue various unimportant objects. They left 
Rupert time to recruit his shattered forces. They 
did not march south to help Essex, who was op- 
posed to the King in person. Essex blundered 
badly, and when he marched into Cornwall was 
out-maneuvered and surrounded, and finally had 
to surrender all his infantry. Before this the King 
had already beaten the Parliamentary general, 
Waller, at Copredy Bridge, the defeat of the Par- 
liamentarians being turned into disaster by the 
conduct of the London trained-bands, who, after 
two years of battle, were still mere militia, insub- 
ordinate and prone to desert. It was not with 
such stuff that victory over the Royalists could be 
obtained. Mere militia who will not submit to 
rigid discipline cannot be made the equals of regu- 
lars by no matter how many years of desultory 
fighting. In the War of the American Revolution 
it was the Continentals — the regulars of Washing- 
ton, Wayne, and Greene — who finally won the 



88 Oliver Cromwell 

victory, while even to the very end of the struggle 
the ordinary militia proved utterly unable to face 
the redcoats. So in the English Civil War, it was 
the carefully drilled and trained horse and foot of 
the Eastern Association, and not the disorderly 
London trained-bands, who overthrew the King's 
men. Cromwell had developed his troops just 
as Grant and Lee, Sherman and Johnston long 
afterward developed theirs. It is only under 
exceptional conditions, and with wholly excep- 
tional populations, that it is possible to forego 
such careful drilling and training. 

One great reason for the failures of the Par- 
liamentary forces was that their leading generals 
no longer greatly cared for success. They were 
Presbyterians, who believed in the Parliament, 
but who also believed in the throne. They hated 
the Independents quite as much as they hated the 
Episcopalians, and felt a growing distrust of Crom- 
well, who in religious matters was the leader of the 
Independents, and who had announced that if he 
met the King in battle he would kill him as quickly 
as he would kill anyone else. Essex was no more 
capable of putting a finish to the war than Mc- 
Clellan was capable of overthrowing the Confed- 
eracy. The one, like the other, had to make room 
for sterner and more resolute men. 

The Committee of Both Kingdoms struggled 
in vain to get their generals to accomplish some- 



The Long Parliament 8 9 

thing. At Newbury — where one indecisive battle 
had already been fought — they got together an 
army nearly double the strength of the King's: 
with no result save that another indecisive battle 
was fought, on October 29, 1644. It was evident 
that there had to be a complete change in the 
management of the war if a victory was to be 
achieved. Accordingly Cromwell once more turned 
from the field to the House of Commons. 

In November he rose in Parliament and de- 
nounced Manchester as utterly inefficient; and 
then turned his onslaught from an attack on one 
man into a general move against all the hitherto 
leaders of the army. On December 9 he ad- 
dressed the House in one of his characteristic 
speeches, rugged in form, but instinct with the 
man's eager, strong personality, fiery earnestness 
and hard common sense. He pointed out, not 
all the truth — for that was not politic — but the 
evident truth that it was not wise to have leaders 
who both served in Parliament and also com- 
manded in the army. The result was the passage 
of the Self-denying Ordinance, by which all mem- 
bers of either of the houses were required to resign 
their commands ; so that, at a stroke, the Presby- 
terian and Parliamentary leaders were removed 
from their control of the forces. Two months 
afterward it was decreed that the forces of the 
Commonwealth should be reorganized on the "New 



90 Oliver Cromwell 

Model." For the short-time service and militia 
levy system there was substituted the New Model ; 
that is, the plan under which in the Eastern Asso- 
ciation the Ironsides had been raised to such a 
pitch of efficiency was extended to include the 
whole army. Sir Thomas Fairfax was put in 
command, but so evident was it to everyone that 
Cromwell was the real master-mind of the Parlia- 
mentary armies that the Self-denying Ordinance 
was not enforced as far as he was concerned, and 
he was retained, nominally as second, but in reality 
as chief, in command. This was not only a vic- 
tory for the radical military party, but a victory 
for the Independents over the Presbyterians. The 
Independent strength was in the army, and they 
now had their own leaders. 

During the period of reorganization of the army 
the war lagged along in its usual fashion, with 
Rupert as much to the fore as ever; and to the 
Royalists it merely seemed that their adversaries 
had gotten at odds, and that the great noblemen, 
the experienced leaders, had been driven from 
their leadership. Their hopes were high, espe- 
cially as in Scotland affairs had taken a sudden and 
most unexpected turn in their favor. Immedi- 
ately after Marston Moor, Montrose had begun his 
wonderful year of crowded life. Recognizing the 
extraordinary military qualities of the Celtic clans- 
men of the Highlands, he had stirred them to 



The Long Parliament 91 

revolt, and had proved himself a master of war by 
a succession of startling victories which finally put 
almost all Scotland at his feet. One would have 
to examine the campaigns of Forrest to find any 
parallel for what he did. Because of his feats he 
has been compared to Cromwell, but his rights 
were on so much smaller a scale that the compari- 
son is no more possible than it would be possible to 
compare Forrest with Grant or Lee. 

It is a noteworthy fact that the two soldier 
types which emerged from the English Civil War 
as victorious over all others were the Cromwellian 
Ironside and the Scotch Highlander. The intense 
religious and patriotic fervor and hard common 
sense of the one was in the other supplanted by a 
mere wild love of fighting for fighting's sake. It 
may be questioned which was most formidable in 
battle, but in a campaign there was no comparison 
whatsoever between them ; and once his other foes 
were vanquished, the Cromwellian soldier had not 
the slightest difficulty in holding down the High- 
lander. 

The victories of Montrose, the feats of Rupert, 
and the failures of the Parliamentarians since 
Marston Moor gave Charles every feeling of con- 
fidence, when, on June 14, 1645, he led his army 
against the New Model at Naseby. As usual 
in these battles, it is not possible to state the 
exact numbers, but it would appear that, as at 



92 Oliver Cromwell 

Marston Moor, the Royalist troops were out- 
numbered, being about 10,000 as against 14,000 
in the Parliamentary army. Fairfax commanded 
for the Parliament, and the King was present in 
person. As usual, the infantry on each side was 
in the center. On the right wing of the Parlia- 
mentarians Cromwell led his horse, while Ireton 
had the horse of the left. Rupert commanded 
the cavalry on the right wing of the Royalists, 
and Sir Marmaduke Langdale that of the left. 
Thus Rupert was not, as at Marston Moor, pitted 
against Cromwell; and anyone except Cromwell 
he could beat. Ireton was a stout soldier, but he 
and his cavalry were completely overthrown; 
then, according to their usual custom, Rupert's 
Cavaliers followed the headlong flight of their 
opponents in an equally headlong pursuit. 
Meanwhile, in the center, the foot crashed to- 
gether and fought with savage obstinacy on equal 
terms. As at Marston Moor, the fight was de- 
cided solely by Cromwell. He overthrew the 
Royalist horse as he always overthrew them, and 
he kept his men in hand as he always kept them. 
Leaving a sufficient force to watch the broken 
hostile squadrons, he wheeled the remainder and 
fell on the Royalist infantry in flank and rear. 
For a moment, King Charles, stirred by a noble 
impulse, led forward his horse guards to do or 
die; but the Earl of Cam worth seized his bridle 



The Long Parliament 93 

and stopped him, saying: "Will you go upon 
your death?" Had the King been indeed a 
king, as ready to stake his own life for his king- 
dom as he was to stake the lives of others, it 
would have gone hard with the man who sought 
to halt him, for in such a case no man is stopped 
by another unless he himself is more than willing ; 
but Charles faltered, the moment passed, and his 
army was overthrown in wild ruin. Rupert came 
back and re-formed his men, but when Cromwell 
charged home with horse and foot the Royalist 
troopers never waited the onslaught. There was 
plenty of light for pursuit now, and Cromwell 
showed yet another trait of the great commanders 
by the unsparing energy with which he followed 
his foe to complete the wreck. For twelve miles 
the Parliamentary horse kept touch with the 
flying foe. The King's army was hopelessly shat- 
tered; from half to two-thirds of their number 
were slain or captured. The Parliamentary losses 
were also heavy; a thousand of their men were 
killed or wounded. Ireton had been wounded, 
and Skippon, the Parliamentary major-general of 
foot. Fairfax, who had behaved with his usual 
gallantry, had had his helmet knocked off in the 
hand-to-hand fighting. The victory was Crom- 
well's. 

So decisive was the overthrow that it prac- 
tically ended the war. For a moment the King 



94 Oliver Cromwell 

had hopes of what Montrose would do; but 
when Montrose came out of the Highlands he 
found that the clansmen would not march beside 
him for a long campaign ; at Philiphaugh he was 
overwhelmed by numbers, and the Royalist party 
in Scotland disappeared with his overthrow. 
Fairfax whipped Goring and captured Bristol. 
Cromwell took Winchester, where he dealt 
severely with certain of his troopers who had 
been plundering. He then stormed Basing 
House, an immense fortified pile, the property 
of the Catholic Marquis of Winchester. Again 
and again the Parliamentary generals had at- 
tempted to take the place, but had always been 
beaten. Cromwell would not be denied; after 
three days' battering with his guns, and an 
evening spent in prayer and in reading the 
115th Psalm, he stormed it with a rush, and 
the splendid castle, its rooms and galleries filled 
with all the treasures of art, was left a blackened 
and blood-stained ruin. After this it was in vain 
that the Royalist troops strove to make head 
against their foes. If they stood in the open 
they were beaten ; castle after castle, and fortified 
manor-house after manor-house, were battered 
down or stormed by Cromwell and his comrades ; 
and in the spring of 1646 the King surrendered 
himself to the Scotch army. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR AND THE DEATH OF THE 

KING. 

WHEN the stout old Royalist, Sir Jacob 
Astley, was overcome and surrendered, 
he exclaimed, as he gave up his sword : 
" Now you have done your work and may go play, 
unless you fall out among yourselves!" It very 
soon became evident that the victors would fall 
out among themselves. Any revolutionary move- 
ment must be carried through by parties whose 
aims are so different, or whose feelings and inter- 
ests are so divergent, that there is great difficulty 
in the victors coming to a working agreement to 
conserve the fruits of their victory. Not only the 
leaders, but more especially their followers — that 
is, the mass of the people — must possess great 
moderation and good sense for this to be possible. 
Otherwise, after much warfare of factions, some 
strong man, a Cromwell or a Napoleon, is forced 
or forces himself to the front and saves the fac- 
tions from destroying one another by laying his 
iron hand on all. 

In the middle of the seventeenth century the 
English people, accustomed for many generations 
to look to the monarch as their real ruler, began 

95 



$6 Oliver Cromwell 

to tumble into chaos when they wrenched them- 
selves free from the ingrained hereditary habit 
which had made loyalty to the King and orderly 
government convertible terms. They were not 
yet fit to govern themselves unaided ; such fitness 
is not a God-given, natural right, but comes to a 
race only through the slow growth of centuries, 
and then only to those races which possess an 
immense reserve fund of strength, common sense, 
and morality. The English of the middle of the 
seventeenth century were very much farther ad- 
vanced along the road than were the French at the 
end of the eighteenth. They had no such dread- 
ful wrongs to avenge as had the French people, 
and they indulged in no such bloodthirsty antics 
among themselves. But they had by no means 
attained to that power of compromise which they 
showed forty years later in the Revolution of 
1688, or which was displayed by their blood-kin 
and political heirs, the American victors in the 
struggles of 1776 and 1861. In the English 
Revolution that placed William on the throne, in 
the American Revolution, and in the American 
Civil War, the victors passed through periods of 
great danger when it seemed possible that the 
fruits of their victory might be thrown away. 
They did not suffer the fate of the victors of 
1648, chiefly because of the growth of the spirit 
of tolerance, of the capacity for compromise, 



The Second Civil War 97 

which enabled them in part to ignore their own 
differences, and in part to abide by a peaceful 
settlement of them. 

In England, by 1688, the Cromwellian move- 
ment had itself educated even those who most 
sincerely believed that they abhorred it; and 
there was a far less servile spirit toward James II. 
than toward Charles I. There was less fanatical 
intolerance of one another among the elements 
that had combined to put William on the throne ; 
and William, otherwise by no means as great a 
man as Cromwell, was yet far more willing to 
accept working compromises, and more content to 
let Parliament go its own way, even when that 
way was not the wisest. After the American 
Revolution Washington's greatness of character, 
sound common sense, and entirely disinterested 
patriotism, made him a bulwark both against 
anarchy and against despotism coming in the 
name of a safeguard against anarchy; and the 
people were fit for self-government, adding to 
their fierce jealousy of tyranny a reluctant and by 
no means whole-hearted, but genuine, admission 
that it could be averted only by coming to an 
agreement among themselves. Washington would 
not let his officers try to make him Dictator, nor 
allow the Continental Army to march against the 
weak Congress which distrusted it, was ungrateful 
to it, and refused to provide for it. Unlike 
7 



98 Oliver Cromwell 

Cromwell, he saw that the safety of the people 
lay in working out their own salvation, even 
though they showed much wrong-headedness and 
blindness, not merely to morality, but to their 
own interests; and, in the long run, the people 
justified this trust. 

But Cromwell never wanted the people to 
decide for themselves, unless they decided in the 
way that he thought right; and, on the other 
hand, the difficulty with the people was even 
greater; for they had neither the desire for 
freedom, the moderation in using freedom, nor 
the toleration of differences of opinion, which the 
American colonists had developed by the end of 
the following century. At the close of, and after, 
the American Civil War the differences of opinion 
and belief among the victors were such as would 
inevitably have produced further fighting in 
Cromwell's time. 

The Northern Democrats were anxious to com- 
bine politically with the defeated Southerners, 
and to reinstate, as nearly as might be, the old 
ante-bellum conditions — that is, to prepare for 
another civil war. The Republican party itself 
showed signs of a deep division between the 
Extremists and Moderates, while there were all 
sorts of violent little factions, just as there were 
Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchy men in Crom- 
well's time. The Garrison or disunion Aboli- 



The Second Civil War 99 

tionists, for instance, had formed just such a 
faction, and had seen their cause triumph, not 
through, but in spite of, their own efforts. If 
the Abolitionists of the Wendell Phillips type, 
instead of seeking to compass Lincoln's defeat 
for the Presidency in 1864 by peaceful means, had 
threatened armed agitation ; if, instead of trying 
to elect McClellan or Seymour at the polls, the 
Northern Democrats had taken the field with the 
former at their head ; if the Republicans had first 
crushed them by force of arms, and then had 
fought among themselves until the extreme radi- 
cal element got the upper hand, installed Grant 
as perpetual President and dissolved Congress 
when it became evident that the Democrats and 
moderate Republicans combined would outnum- 
ber the radicals — we should have had a very fair 
analogy to what happened in the Cromwellian era. 
In such a case, moreover, be it remembered 
that the fault would have lain less with the per- 
petual President than with the people whose 
defects called him into being. Cromwell did not 
stand on the lofty plane of Washington; but, 
morally, he was infinitely and beyond all com- 
parison above the class of utterly selfish and 
unscrupulous usurpers, of whom Napoleon is the 
greatest representative. At the close of the first 
civil war there is no reason to suppose that he 
had any ambition inconsistent with the highest 

' fC. 



IOO 



Oliver Cromwell 



good of his country, or any thought of making 
himself paramount. To all outward seeming, his 
efforts were conscientiously directed to securing 
the fruits of the victory for liberty, while at the 
same time securing stability in the government. 
Unfortunately, in coming to an agreement among 
men, no moderation or wisdom on the part of any 
one man will suffice. Something of these qualities 
must be possessed by all parties to the agreement. 
The incurable treachery of King Charles rendered 
it hopeless to work with him; and the utter 
inability of Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Roman 
Catholics, and indeed of all parties and all creeds 
to act on the live-and-let-live principle, rendered 
a really free government almost unworkable at 
the moment. How little Cromwell yet thought 
of striving for a kingly position is shown by his 
conduct in his social relations, notably by the 
marriages of his children, who at this time sought 
their mates in families of his own rank. The only 
one of these marriages with which we need concern 
ourselves is that of his daughter, Bridget, to 
Ireton, a good soldier and able politician, who 
was devoted to Cromwell, and was on very close 
and intimate terms with him. 

The religious element entered into everything 
Cromwell did, mixing curiously with his hard com- 
mon sense and practical appreciation of worldly 
benefits. It appears in all his letters and speeches. 



The Second Civil War 101 

Such a letter as he wrote to the Speaker of the 
House after the storming of Bristol, is in thought 
and manner more akin to the writings of some old 
Hebrew prophet than to those of any conqueror 
before or after Cromwell's time. It is saturated, 
not merely with biblical phraseology, but with 
biblical feeling, all the glory being ascribed to 
God, and the army claiming as their sole honor 
that God had vouchsafed to use them in His ser- 
vice, and that by faith and prayer they had 
obtained the favor of the Most High. It is im- 
possible for a fair-minded and earnest man to read 
Cromwell's letters and reports after action, and the 
prayers he made and the psalms he chose to read 
and to give out before action, and to doubt the 
intensity of the man's religious fervor. In our day 
such utterances would be hypocritical. Almost 
the only modern generals in whom they would 
have been the sincere expression of inward belief 
were Stonewall Jackson and Gordon; and the 
times had changed so utterly that even they could 
not possibly give utterance to them as Cromwell 
did. But in Cromwell's time the most earnest 
Puritans thought as he did, and expressed their 
thoughts as he did. That such expression should 
lend itself very readily to hypocrisy was inevitable ; 
indeed, it was perhaps inevitable that the habitual 
use of such expression should breed somewhat of 
hypocrisy in almost any user. The incessant 



102 Oliver Cromwell 

employment by Cromwell and his comrades of the 
word "saints," to distinguish themselves and those 
who thought like them, is particularly objection- 
able in its offensive self-consciousness. 

In this letter about the taking of Bristol Crom- 
well touches upon the religious differences which 
were the great causes of division among the vic- 
tors. He writes : 

" Presbyterians, Independents, all have here the 
same spirit of faith and prayer ; the same presence 
and answer; they agree here; have no names of 
difference; pity it is it should be otherwise any- 
where. . . . And for brethren in things of the 
mind we look for no compulsion but that of light 
and reason." 

Cromwell strove earnestly to bring about har- 
mony between the Independents of the New 
Model army and the Presbyterians, who were 
dominant in Parliament. Even in that day there 
were in private life men of high character and 
great intellect who believed in true religious lib- 
erty, men who stood far ahead of Cromwell ; but 
Cromwell was equally far ahead of all the men 
who then had any real control in public life; so 
far ahead, indeed, that he could not get any con- 
siderable body of public opinion abreast of him. 

The Ironsides, the cavalry of Cromwell, stood 
as the extreme representatives of the spirit which 
actuated the army. The great bulk of them were 



The Second Civil War 103 

men of intense political and religious convictions. 
However, many even of the cavalry, and a large 
majority of the rank and file of the infantry, were 
of the ordinary military type, men of no particu- 
lar convictions, a considerable number, mdeed, 
having been enlisted from among the captured 
armies and garrisons of the King himself. Under 
the ties of discipline and comradeship, such men 
were sure to follow with entire fidelity the master- 
ful spirits among the officers and in their own 
ranks ; and all these masterful spirits were devoted 
to Cromwell as the great leader who had given 
them victory. They were even more devoted to 
their conceptions of religious and political liberty, 
and were resolutely bent on striking down the 
King who embodied, in their minds, the principles 
of religious and political oppression. These men 
had broken entirely with the past, and were no 
longer overawed by the name of hereditary power. 
"What," they asked, "were the Lords of England 
but William the Conqueror's Colonels, or the 
Barons but his Majors, or the Knights but his 
Captains?" 

They believed they were indeed the Lord's 
chosen people, and that upon them, as conquer- 
ors, there devolved the duty of safeguarding the 
interests of religion and of the Commonwealth. 
They wished to strike down the bishops as well 
as the King; and though most of them were 



104 Oliver Cromwell 

Congregation alists or Baptists, they had already 
begun to develop plenty of men whose Christianity 
was of the most heterodox form, or who boldly an- 
nounced that they had a right to profess any creed, 
Christian or otherwise, if they so desired. To- 
gether with their iron discipline as an army went 
wide liberty of thought and discussion on all out- 
side matters — religious and political alike — when 
they were not in the ranks. There were preachers 
who served with somber fidelity as privates, but 
who were fanatical inciters of Republican enthu- 
siasm in every leisure hour, haranguing and ex- 
horting their fellow-soldiers about every political 
or religious wrong. 

Trouble was brewing between this army and 
Parliament. The Episcopalians — the Royalists — 
had left Parliament when the war broke out. The 
Presbyterians were in complete command. Lon- 
don, which held the purse-strings of the Parlia- 
mentary cause, was strongly Presbyterian. Now, 
the Presbyterians, as the war went on, had grown 
more and more afraid of their allies, and, indeed, 
of too decisive a victory over the King. They 
were just as much bent upon an intolerant uni- 
formity in Church matters as was Laud, though 
they wished to substitute a different form of 
Church government, which should rest upon a 
broader and more popular basis. They wished to 
make Parliament supreme, but they had no idea 



The Second Civil War 105 

of dispensing with the King, and they were 
exceedingly distrustful of a popular movement 
which would extend liberty beyond and beneath 
the classes from which they drew their strength. 
On the contrary, the army, which represented the 
Independent movement, was strongly democratic 
in its tendencies, and was filled with sullen wrath 
against the King. 

Cromwell himself was no theorist; in fact, he 
was altogether too little of one. He wished to do 
away with concrete acts of oppression and injus- 
tice; he sought to make life easier for any who 
suffered tangible wrong. Though earnestly bent 
upon doing justice as he saw it, and desirous to 
secure the essentials of liberty for the people as a 
whole, he failed to see that questions of form — 
that is, of law — in securing liberty might be them- 
selves essential instead of, as they seemed to him, 
non-essential. He was reluctant to enter into 
general schemes of betterment, especially if they 
seemed in any way visionary. But when his feel- 
ings were greatly roused over specific cases of 
wrong-doing or oppression, he sometimes became 
so wrought up as to advocate reform in language 
so sweeping that he seemed to commit himself, 
not only to absolute religious toleration, but to 
complete political equality. Thus when he broke 
with Lord Manchester he told him that he hoped 
"to live to see never a nobleman in England." 



106 Oliver Cromwell 

In open Parliament he denounced "monarchical 
government. ' ' He advocated entire religious free- 
dom. In dealing with the army he declared his 
readiness to maintain the doctrine that "the 
foundation and the supremacy is in the people — 
radically in them — and to be set down by them 
in their representations" — that is, by their repre- 
sentatives in Parliament. 

Of course, to make his conduct square with 
these various utterances, Cromwell would have 
had to strive for precisely such a government as 
Washington was able to inaugurate a century 
and a half later; a government in which there 
should be complete religious toleration, in which 
all differences of rank and title should be abol- 
ished, and in which the basis of representation in 
Parliament would have to approach more or less 
closely to manhood suffrage. Doubtless, there 
were times when Cromwell ardently wished for 
such a government; but it was wholly out of 
the question to realize it in the middle of the 
seventeenth century, even in England. Genera- 
tions had to pass before men could grasp the true 
principles of religious toleration and political 
equality in all their bearings; and, like every 
other man who actually works out great reforms, 
who actually does signal service in the world, 
Cromwell had to face facts as they were, and not 
as bodies of extremists — no matter how good — 






The Second Civil War 107 

thought they ought to be. The best and most 
high-minded of the Puritan party were now 
growing to fear lest the Presbyterians should 
try to perpetuate the old religious oppression 
under a new name. Milton — with but one 
exception the greatest poet of the English 
tongue, a man whose political and social ideas 
were at least two centuries in advance of his time, 
but who had the good sense to accept, no matter 
with what heart-burning, the best possible when 
he could not get the best — Milton expressed the 
convictions of his whole party when he said that 
if "Presbyter was but Priest writ large" the 
people were no better off than before. 

The army began to show openly its spirit of 
fierce unrest. A very considerable portion avowed 
extreme republican theories. The Levellers, as 
they were called, were looked upon in that day, 
even by advocates of freedom like Cromwell, 
with great distrust, although the principles they 
advocated — such as manhood suffrage — are now 
the commonplaces of American politics. Of 
course, then they were not commonplaces; they 
were revolutionary ideas, for the reception of 
which the mind of the English people was not 
ready, and therefore it was the duty of men who 
sought practical reform to refuse to put these 
schemes into operation. 

There were much more extreme and dangerous 



108 Oliver Cromwell 

groups than the mere Republicans; groups of 
men in whom the desire for religious, political, 
and moral reform had overstepped the broad, but 
not always clearly marked, border line which 
divides sane and healthy fervor from fanaticism. 
In such troublous times small sects and parties of 
extremists swarm. Already the foundations were 
laid for the Fifth Monarchy men, the men who 
believed that the times were ripe for the installa- 
tion of the last great world monarchy, the mon- 
archy of which the Saviour himself was to be 
Ruler; the men who shouted for King Jesus, 
and were ferociously opposed to everybody who 
would not advocate the immediate introduction 
into all mundane affairs of Heaven's law, as the 
Fifth Monarchy men chose to interpret it. Of 
course, men of this type are always to be found 
in every free government, and aside from their 
peculiar notions, they may have excellent traits. 
In peaceful times and places like the United 
States at the present day, they merely join little 
extreme parties, and run small, separate tickets 
on election day, thereby giving aid, comfort, and 
amusement to the totally unregenerate. In times 
of great political convulsion, when the appeal to 
arms has been made, these harmless bodies may 
draft into their ranks — as the Fifth Monarchy 
men did — fierce and dangerous spirits, ever ready 
to smite down with any weapons the possible good, 



The Second Civil War 109 

because it is not the impossible best. When this 
occurs they need to be narrowly watched. 

There are many good people who find it diffi- 
cult to keep in mind the obvious fact that, while 
extremists are sometimes men who are in advance 
of their age, more often they are men who are not 
in advance at all, but simply to one side or the 
other of a great movement, or even lagging behind 
it, or trying to pilot it in the wrong direction. 

The seething unrest of the army found expres- 
sion in the creation of a regular political organiza- 
tion to oppose the organized Parliament. The 
officers formed a council, and the rank and file 
chose delegates, two for each company or troop, 
known as ' ' agitators . " In short , the army became 
an organized political body whose scarcely ac- 
knowledged function was to control or supersede 
the Parliament ; just as, prior to the outbreak of 
the American Revolution, Committees of Corre- 
spondence were formed, in the various colonies, 
out of which there sprang the Continental Con- 
gress, which superseded the loyalist colonial legis- 
latures. 

Cromwell, like every other great leader who 
rises in a period of storm and convulsion, could 
partly direct the forces around him, and in part 
had to be directed by them. He did not sym- 
pathize with the extreme position of the army 
about the King — the ''man of blood," as the 



no Oliver Cromwell 

Puritan zealots called him, whose life they already 
demanded; nor yet with their radical political 
aspirations. But it was the army alone through 
which he could act, which gave him his strength ; 
and in return he was the one man who could in any 
way check or control it, for its loyalty to, and 
admiration of, the great leader at whose hands it 
had drained the cup of victory, were the only 
emotions strong enough to offset its fierce zeal 
for its own theories of Church and State. 

Cromwell was most earnestly desirous of get- 
ting a working compromise between the King, 
the Presbyterian Parliament, and the Independent 
army ; a compromise which would allow the King 
to reign, exercising such executive powers as the 
Parliament felt he should possess, and which 
should leave the supreme control to Parliament, 
but with sufficient guarantees for political and 
religious freedom to insure justice to the Inde- 
pendents and the soldiers. He strove so hard to 
accomplish his purpose as to excite angry mutter- 
ings against himself among his own followers in 
the army; and the first steps of the impending 
revolution were seemingly taken by him only 
because he was irresistibly pushed onward by the 
army itself. When, however, he had once made 
up his mind that there was no other path possible, 
he trod it as a leader, with all his wonted firmness 
and decision. 



The Second Civil War 



in 



The effort for reconciliation was hopeless, 
chiefly because the King was an utterly impossi- 
ble person with whom to deal. He had many 
bitter foes ; but they could not prevail against 
him until he convinced some of his would-be 
friends that he was absolutely and utterly untrust- 
worthy. He never for a moment entertained the 
idea of accepting his defeat, of abandoning the 
effort to rule as a despot, and of acting with good 
faith toward the people. His purpose was to play 
off the Presbyterians, together with the Scotch, 
against the Independents ; as he wrote to a friend, 
he hoped to get either the one party or the other 
"to side with me for extirpating one another, and 
I shall be really King again." 

Meanwhile, the Presbyterian Parliament was 
determined not to tolerate the "sectaries" of the 
Congregationalist and Baptist Churches, and was 
drawing closer and closer to the Scotch Covenant- 
ers, who were even more intolerant; and finally 
it grew ready to accept the King himself on almost 
any terms, if it could o v^ercome the army. 

But the army could not be overcome. It had 
perfected its political organization, and had begun 
to work through Ireton — Cromwell's other self. 
The army was genuinely reluctant to break with 
the Parliament, for, after all, it was deeply per- 
meated with the English respect for law and order ; 
and in the elections to fill the vacancies in the 



ii2 Oliver Cromwell 

House, very many Independents- — men like Ireton, 
Fairfax, and Blake, the aftertime admiral — had 
been returned, so that there was in the Parliament 
a party which strongly sympathized with the 
army. 

The majority in Parliament, however, remained 
steadfast in its own views, and by its refusal to 
give the soldiers their arrears of pay it added a 
very tangible, material grievance to those of an 
ethical character. In January, 1647, the Scottish 
army delivered King Charles to the agents of the 
Parliament, and quitted England, having received 
part of the sum of money due them. 

The most complicated and devious negotiations 
followed between the King, the Parliament, and 
the army. Cromwell tried to get the army in 
touch with the Parliament, but found the Par- 
liament hopelessly obstinate. He tried to get it 
in touch with the King, but found the King hope- 
lessly false. Yet, neither could the King and Par- 
liament come together. Then the army threatened 
mutiny, whereupon the Parliament began to nego- 
tiate for bringing back the Scottish force to over- 
awe the New Model, and attempted the disband- 
ment of the latter. The army struck back with 
great decision and sent Cornet Joyce to seize the 
person of the King and take him away from the 
Presbyterians. Parliament attempted to proceed 
with the disbandment of the army, but was forced 



The Second Civil War 113 

to abandon the effort when it became evident that 
to pursue it meant war. No one knew quite what 
the outcome would be, or, indeed, what his own 
course would be. 

Cromwell, like the rest, was drifting; he seri- 
ously thought of leaving England and going to 
Germany to fight for the Protestant cause, as the 
Thirty Years' War had not yet come quite to an 
end. To the French ambassador, who sounded 
him on the object of his ambition, he answered: 
"No one rises so high as he who knows not 
whither he is going." He was certainly at this 
time making the most honest efforts to come to 
an agreement, either with the King, or the Par- 
liament, or with both, provided only liberty of 
conscience should be granted, the power of Par- 
liament guaranteed against the despotism of the 
King, and the rights of the people guaranteed as 
against the despotism of Parliament. But, when 
Parliament began to negotiate with the Scots on 
its account, and Charles secretly sought to enter 
into a separate agreement with the Scots on his 
account, to bring about an invasion of England, 
while the city mob, which was rabidly Presby- 
terian, forced the hand of the House of Com- 
mons and compelled its members to defy the 
army, it became evident that Oliver had to choose 
his course. Reluctantly he was pushed along the 
road of military revolution. The speaker and the 
8 



ii 4 Oliver Cromwell 

Independent members of Parliament, in fear of 
the London mob, took refuge with the army, 
whither Cromwell himself had already gone. On 
June 10 the army issued a manifesto, demand- 
ing a settlement of the difficulties upon terms 
which it approved. Early in August it marched 
in formidable and orderly parade through the city, 
overawing resistance by its mere appearance, and 
Parliament submitted. This was the real begin- 
ning of the military interference which terminated 
in the military dictatorship of one man. If Crom- 
well is to be blamed for what he did to the Long 
Parliament, this is the step for which he is to be 
blamed most; yet it was a step approved by 
Milton, Fairfax, Ireton, and the great majority 
of the best and most high-minded believers in 
English liberty who were then alive. The con- 
duct of the King and the Parliament had been 
such that it is difficult to see how any other course 
was possible. 

Cromwell did his best to stop the Revolution 
at the point it had now reached. For months he 
endeavored to make terms with the King on the 
conditions outlined above ; and he not only put a 
stop to the extreme democratic agitation of the 
Levellers and refused to further the plan for a 
republican commonwealth, but, with prompt 
severity, repressed a mutiny that broke out under 
the cry of "England's Freedom and Soldiers' 



The Second Civil War 115 

Rights." He disregarded the grumbling of the 
army until he became convinced that Charles was 
incurably false, incurably treacherous and un- 
trustworthy, and was fomenting a counter-revolu- 
tion. Then Cromwell turned from him with 
loathing, and made up his mind to trust to the 
sword, and to strike down anyone, even the King 
himself, if the need warranted it. 

It was high time for action. In Ireland the 
Royalists, the Catholics, and even the Presby- 
terians, were uniting against the Parliament. The 
Scotch, under the lead of Hamilton and the Pres- 
byterian Royalists, declared for the King; the 
English Presbyterians were for him to the extent 
that they were against the army ; and throughout 
England the Cavaliers were arming for an uprising. 
Dark indeed seemed the peril. It had taken four 
years for the English Presbyterians, the Scotch, 
and the New Model, the army of the Independ- 
ents, to conquer the Royalists, and now the New 
Model was pitted single-handed against the Scotch 
and the Royalists, while the Presbyterians were at 
best lukewarm. Nevertheless, exactly as in the 
French Revolution, the victory lay with the 
Mountain when it was brought face to face not 
only with hostile parties in France but with the 
rest of armed Europe, so now the fierce energy of 
the New Model, with the greatest of Englishmen 
at its head, was destined to prove too much for 



n6 Oliver Cromwell 

its foes. The grim Ironsides rallied to their cause 
with the devotion of fanatics, and the well-ordered 
discipline of splendid soldiers. With fierce ex- 
hortations and sermons, with internal searchings 
of spirit, with outpourings of prayer, they made 
ready for battle, and in each dark Puritan heart 
welled the determination not only to put down 
armed resistance, but to take the last great ven- 
geance upon the King, the cause of the blood- 
guiltiness. 

In April, 1648, the Second Civil War broke 
out. The gentry of Wales were a unit for the 
King, and the commonalty followed them. The 
Cavaliers rose in force in the North, and the Scotch 
prepared to send a formidable army across the 
border to their aid ; and there were Royalist out- 
breaks everywhere, even in the southern and 
eastern counties. Berwick, Carlyle, Chester, Pem- 
broke, Colchester, were seized and held for the 
King. The Presbyterians of London were in 
commotion ; the Presbyterians in Parliament itself 
were half-hearted and divided ; but the Independ- 
ents and the army had no doubts. Fairfax 
marched into Kent and Essex, and, after some 
hard fighting, trampled under foot the insurrec- 
tion. One Parliamentary colonel whipped the 
Welsh at St. Fagan's; another crushed out a 
Royalist rising in Lancashire; General Lambert 
was sent to the North, where Sir Marmaduke 



The Second Civil War 117 

Langdale — Oliver's old foe at Naseby — had raised 
Yorkshire for the King. Oliver himself marched 
to the siege of Pembroke, which, owing to lack of 
cannon, he could not take until July 11. This 
ended the Welsh War. The risings in the south 
and center had been thoroughly stamped out; 
the fleet, which had partially revolted, was for 
the most part brought back to loyalty ; and there 
remained only to deal with the Northern Royalists 
and the Scotch army under the Duke of Hamilton, 
which had by this time crossed the border. 

The composition of Hamilton's army and the 
history of events in both Scotland and Ireland at 
this moment, are alike sufficient to show the tangle 
in which politics then were — the kaleidoscopic 
changes in the relations of factions and parties, 
and the seeming minuteness of the points of dif- 
ference over which these same parties waged 
ferocious and resolute war. Hamilton's cavalry 
was commanded by Munro, who had come over 
from Ulster to take part in the invasion of Eng- 
land. Munro and the Scotch Presbyterians of 
Ulster had, during the years immediately suc- 
ceeding the great Irish uprising, been the formi- 
dable and merciless opponents of the Irish of the 
North. But when the English Civil War was 
fairly on, the English Royalists in Ireland — Epis- 
copalians and Catholics alike — gradually lost their 
animosity toward their Irish foes, in their greater 



n8 Oliver Cromwell 

animosity toward the Puritans, and finally the 
Presbyterians followed suit. This resulted in the 
release of Munro and a large part of the Presby- 
terian force in Ulster, who went to the aid of 
Hamilton. Hamilton's own government was Pres- 
byterian and ostentatiously devoted to the Cove- 
nant. It is very difficult for a modem observer 
to see any essential point of difference, either in 
their attitude toward the Covenant, toward the 
King, or toward England ; between the party that 
at the moment controlled Scotland, and the party 
which was soon to drive it out of power. Yet 
the bitterness between them was intense. The 
bulk of the Presbyterian ministers, and the fiercest 
and most intense Presbyterian zealots, hated 
Hamilton and his fellows with mortal hatred, and 
were only waiting their chance to rise against 
them. 

Cromwell advanced to the encounter with entire 
confidence, and sternly anxious to get at his foes. 
He was a thorough Englishman at a time when, 
to the thorough Englishman, the Scotch were 
classed with other aliens. Bitterly though he 
hated the Royalists, he yet acknowledged them 
as fellow-countrymen; but he made no such 
acknowledgment in the case of the Scots. He 
explained that he preferred the Cavalier interest 
to the Scottish interest, just as he preferred the 
Scottish to the Irish ; and he now moved against 



The Second Civil War 119 

enemies whom he regarded not merely as enemies 
to his cause, but as enemies to his country. 

There seemed every reason for the Scots to be 
confident. Even with their help the Parliamen- 
tarians had been able to put down the Royalists 
only at the cost of four years of hard fighting; 
and now the Scotch and the Royalists were to act 
together. They were to be pitted against Crom- 
well, the best Parliamentary commander, to be 
sure ; but the Scotch had done at least as well as 
the average of the allies at the victory of Marston 
Moor, and still had in mind the memory of their 
easy successes against their English foes in the 
two Bishops' Wars. 

The great victories of the Parliamentary army 
had hitherto been won when the odds in numbers 
were in their favor ; now, they were about to fight 
with the odds over two to one against them. 
Hamilton's army was about 21,000 strong, includ- 
ing 3,000 Yorkshire Royalists under Langdale. 
Cromwell had only some 9,000 men; but the 
great bulk of them were veterans, who under his 
leadership had become the finest soldiers of the 
age. 

Hamilton moved slowly south toward Preston, 
his army scattered in a long line, Langdale at the 
head, and Munro bringing up the rear. Crom- 
well abandoned his heavy baggage-train that it 
might not encumber his movements; Lambert 



120 Oliver Cromwell 

joined him, and he marched with fiery speed to 
strike his foes. The Scotch, confident in their 
numbers, and ignorant of the movements of their 
speedy antagonist, advanced in loose order. On 
August 1 7 Cromwell struck their army ; by which 
time Hamilton's straggling march had resulted in 
Langdale's taking position to cover its left flank. 
The Scotch were partially aware of their danger 
and were uneasily trying to concentrate. Lang- 
dale was left to bear the shock of the first attack 
single-handed. Cromwell appreciated, as well as 
any commander that ever lived, the vital element 
of time; the need for taking full advantage of 
what the moment brought forth. His headlong 
march had resulted in some of his soldiers lagging 
behind the others, but he had gained what he 
wanted ; he had surprised his foes when they were 
unprepared to use their superiority of force, and 
he dashed at them as soon as his foremost men 
came up, determined to destroy them in detail. 
Langdale made a stiff fight, and owing to the 
character of the country — the fields were small, 
and the fences strong and high — the cavalry was 
not able to do much, so that the decisive fighting 
was done by the infantry, which was not usually 
the case in these wars. The struggle took place 
about four miles from Preston, near which town, 
but south of the river Ribble, the bulk of the 
Scotch foot were gathered. 



The Second Civil War 121 

For four hours Langdale's men clung to their 
hedges and buildings, regiment after regiment of 
the Cromwellians fighting to dislodge them. Says 
Cromwell : " Our men fought with incredible valor 
and resolution . . . often coming to push of Pike, 
and to close Fire, and always making the Enemy 
to recoil . . . the Enemy making, though he was 
still worsted, very stiff and sturdy resistance. 
Colonel Dean's and Colonel Pride's, outwinging 
the enemy, could not come to so much share of 
the Action . . . the Enemy shogging down 
toward the Bridge, and keeping almost all in 
reserve that so he might bring fresh commands 
often to fight." 

The Scotch sent some men and ammunition to 
Langdale, but made no serious effort to help him, 
and continued their march. At last he was over- 
powered and driven into the town. As soon as 
his men were dislodged from the hedges and 
enclosures, the Cromwellian horse fell furiously 
upon them, utterly routing and scattering them; 
at the same time, the Cromwellian foot, pushing 
forward, drove back the Scotch foot, which had 
been posted near the bridge to secure a passage 
for Langdale across the Ribble, and cut off the 
fugitives from the rest of the army. 

The Ironsides thundered into the streets of 
Preston at the heels of Langdale and the flying 
remnants of his forces. Hamilton led one or two 



122 Oliver Cromwell 

charges, and for a moment checked the pursuit, 
but it was now too late to retrieve matters, and 
soon afterward the whole of his army was again 
in panic rout. The beaten cavalry fled north, 
goaded by the Cromwellian sword, until they 
reached the rear guard under Munro. Most of 
the Yorkshire and Scotch infantry north of the 
Ribble were killed, captured, or scattered ; a few 
only escaped to the Scotch army south of the 
Ribble by swimming across it. 

The day thus ended with the defeat of part of 
the Scotch forces, who lost in killed or captured, 
5,000 men, besides those who were dispersed. 
Moreover, the Scotch army was cut in two; 
Munro being to the north, separated from all the 
rest, who, under Hamilton, were completely cut 
off from their base in Scotland. Sending a few 
troops to harry the flying horsemen, Cromwell 
turned to deal with the Scotch main army, which 
was even yet more numerous than his own. 
But the Scotch were cowed by the success of 
Cromwell's utterly unexpected attack. The sol- 
diers had lost confidence in their leaders, and 
they were cut off from their own country, and, 
therefore, from all hope of supplies. A council 
of war was held that night, and the retreat was 
continued. The fagged-out Cromwellians fol- 
lowed and harassed them. The horse, under 
Colonel Thornhaugh, rode into their rear ranks 



The Second Civil War 123 

and bothered and detained them, though at cost 
of the life of the Colonel, who was shot in one of 
the fierce struggles. Again and again the Scotch 
stood, but each time to be beaten ; the last stand 
being made at Win wick church, under a "little 
spark in a blue bonnet" who himself was slain. 
Here they lined the hedges with musketeers, and 
filled the lane with their pikemen, and hours 
went by before the Puritans, under Pride, finally 
pushed their charge home, and gained possession 
of the place which had been held so stubbornly. 
Both sides were utterly worn out, and it was 
impossible to urge the pursuit as rapidly and 
strongly as Cromwell hoped. Finally, leaving 
Lambert to deal with the shattered fragments of 
Hamilton's command, Cromwell turned north and 
followed Munro. 

The victory was overwhelming. Two thousand 
Scotch and Royalists had been slain, and 10,000 
were captured ; more than Cromwell's whole force. 
Almost all the generals were taken ; Hamilton was 
afterward beheaded. The fate of the captured 
rank and file was hard. Throughout the First 
Civil War, the common soldiers, when taken, had 
either been exchanged or released, or often enough 
had enlisted on the side of the victors; but the 
Puritan generals and those behind them were in 
no mood to take a merciful view of men whom 
they regarded as wanton offenders, whether they 



i24 Oliver Cromwell 

were Scotchmen or Englishmen. The captives of 
Preston battle were sold into slavery ; some being 
sent to the Virginia planters, and others to the 
Venetian Government, for galley slaves. When 
the Puritans could act thus toward their fellow- 
Englishmen, and toward the Scotch Presbyterians 
who were so nearly of their own creed, there is 
small cause for wonder in the treatment afterward 
accorded the Irish. It was a merciless age, the 
age of Tilly and Wallenstein, and we cannot judge 
its great men by the canons of to-day. 

This was the first time that Cromwell had 
actually been in supreme command in a great 
victory, and too much praise cannot be accorded 
him for his hardihood, energy, and skill. The 
speed of his motions and his prompt decision had 
rendered it possible for him to strike home at his 
adversary in the flank, and to eat him up piece- 
meal. During three days of incessant marching 
and fighting he halted only to do battle or to 
take the rest absolutely needed; and at the end 
of that time the enemy's foot had been killed, 
captured, or dispersed to the last man, and his 
horse was a beaten rabble, flying toward the 
border. 

The battle of Preston put an end to the Second 
Civil War. Colchester capitulated to Fairfax 
immediately afterward. The part of the fleet 
that had revolted had come back under Prince 



The Second Civil War 125 

Charles and Rupert, to cooperate with the risen 
Royalists, but could do nothing; most of the 
ships in time returned to their allegiance to the 
Parliament. The indomitable Rupert, with seven 
ships, kept the sea and made a long cruise, which 
finally degenerated into mere buccaneering. 
Blake, whom the Parliament made admiral, 
pursued him, captured most of his ships, and 
finally forced him to take refuge in France. In 
Scotland, Argyle and the Presbyterian ministers — 
the Kirk party — on the news of Hamilton's over- 
throw, promptly rose in the so-called Whigamore 
raid. Munro fell back, plundering right and left 
until he crossed the border. 

Cromwell's exertions had been so severe that 
he could not follow the flying Royalists with his 
usual rapidity. The army had been long without 
pay; they had not a penny with which to get 
their horses shod, and so many horses had been 
slain and were lamed or done out that a large 
number of the troopers were on foot, and the 
others could hardly spur their jaded mounts into 
a trot. Munro was not only a ruthless plunderer, 
but a hard fighter, and on his arrival in Scotland 
Argyle felt doubtful as to his capacity to cope 
with him, and sent to Cromwell for assistance. 
Cromwell promptly invaded Scotland, being care- 
ful to pose as the ally of Argyle and the Kirk, and 
therefore the true friend of the Scottish nation. 



126 Oliver Cromwell 

According to his custom, he rigorously sup- 
pressed plundering. All resistance withered away 
before him. He was received at Edinburgh as 
a powerful and honored ally, and before he re- 
crossed the border the Scotch were again avowed 
supporters, for the time being at least, of the Par- 
liament. 

The enemy in arms had been defeated. It 
remained to deal with the Parliament and the 
Presbyterian party. Some had been active for 
the King ; most had been lukewarm ; the victory 
had been a victory for the army, and therefore for 
the Independents. Neither Cromwell nor the 
army was of a temper to refrain from finishing 
matters. Before the struggle was decided Crom- 
well had written Fairfax: "I pray God teach this 
nation and those that are over us . . . what the 
mind of God may be in all this, and what our 
duty is. Surely it is not that the poor, godly 
people of this Kingdom should still be made the 
object of wrath and anger, nor that our God would 
have our necks under a yoke of bondage. For 
these things that have lately come to pass have 
been the wonderful works of God, breaking the 
rod of the oppressor." 

He was not in the least a doctrinaire Republican 
or Parliamentarian ; he believed as little in the 
divine right of majorities as in the divine right of 
kings. Neither would he have admitted such a 



The Second Civil War 127 

right as existing in an army, or, as yet, in him- 
self. But it was impossible to stand still. He 
had to act with some party, though with none was 
he in entire accord ; for one was hostile, another 
hopelessly undecided, the third prone to extreme 
measures and representing only a minority in the 
nation. He could only act with the last, and yet 
this meant an overturn of the recognized govern- 
mental authorities. Whether he would or not, 
he had to proceed along the path of revolution. 

The Presbyterians — the men who controlled 
Parliament — were halting between two burdens. 
They would not push far enough against the King 
to make the Revolution a success, or to put a 
permanent end to despotism ; and they would not 
eat their past words and deeds by turning wholly 
to his support. The King himself was obstinately 
bent on keeping the supreme power in his hands 
and setting the people under his feet, whatever he 
might promise; and this was the attitude of the 
large Royalist and Episcopalian party, which had 
showed, in supporting him, either that it cared 
little for liberty and eagerly championed a ser- 
vility which it misnamed loyalty, or else that 
it feared disorder more than tyranny. 

On the other hand, the determined foes of 
Absolutism, the armed Independents, were even 
more cut off from the bulk of the nation by their 
good qualities than by their shortcomings. Their 



128 Oliver Cromwell 

advocacy of toleration for every creed, their desire 
for legal reform, and their strong democratic ten- 
dencies, all put them so far in advance of the rest 
of the nation as to be completely out of touch 
with it ; and they offended it even more than their 
harshness and narrowness, and the behavior of the 
bands of fantastic enthusiasts in their ranks. More- 
over, the sincerity of their convictions, at a time 
when the practical application of belief in the rule 
of the majority was entirely new and strange, 
drove them to rely on their strong right arms, in- 
stead of upon the votes of a people which was 
mainly hostile or apathetic. When Cromwell 
acted with them, heedless of what the majority 
might think, he was making ready for a time when 
he might choose in turn to disregard the majority 
within their own ranks. 

Though neither Cromwell nor the Independents 
believed in the abstract in employing the army as 
an instrument of government, they were face to 
face with a condition of affairs in which, partly 
because of their own shortcomings, but very much 
more because of the shortcomings of their antago- 
nists, they were driven to adopt this as the only 
possible course. Doubtless Cromwell was still act- 
ing as he sincerely believed the interests of the 
nation demanded. In the complex tissue of 
motives which go to determine a man's deeds it 
is rarely possible to say that there is not some, and 



The Second Civil War 129 

mayhap even a strong, element of self-interest 
and of desire for personal aggrandizement; yet 
Cromwell's conduct toward the King goes to show 
that he would gladly have saved him had not the 
behavior of this typical Stuart been such as to 
render it impossible for an upright and far-seeing 
friend of English liberty longer to remain his ally. 
Parliament had no sooner been relieved by the 
action of the army from all danger from the 
King's adherents, than in September it proceeded 
to open negotiations with the King. These nego- 
tiations in effect aimed at the destruction of 
the army by uniting Parliament and King against 
it; among other things, they expressly excluded 
any toleration for the sects which made up the 
strength of the army. It would have been inex- 
cusable folly for the men who had won the victory 
to submit to such action. The army, headed by 
Ireton, demanded a purge of the House which 
would rid it of the members so treacherous to the 
interests of the nation. Ireton and his followers 
then laid before Fairfax a remonstrance, which 
included a demand that the King should be 
brought to justice for the " treason," "blood," and 
"mischief" of which he had been guilty. Fairfax 
opposed this and carried the army with him in 
favor of a substitute which merely requested the 
King to assent to a constitutional plan which 
would have limited his powers precisely as those 
9 



130 Oliver Cromwell 

of Queen Victoria are now limited, and would have 
made the Constitution of England what it now is. 
A more moderate proposal was never made by 
victorious revolutionists, and it shows conclusively 
that the fault was not with Cromwell and his fol- 
lowers when they were forced to overturn the 
King and the Parliament. But Charles promptly 
rejected the proposals and thereby signed his own 
death-warrant. He had just sought, in Crom- 
well's words, "to vassalize us to a foreign nation," 
and now, after having twice plunged England into 
civil war, and shown himself eager to submit her 
to the power of the alien, he obstinately refused 
a plan which would not merely have left him un- 
punished, but would have given him all the power 
of a constitutional monarch; a power greater 
than that which the House of Orange at that time 
enjoyed in Holland. 

The House of Commons stood firm in its posi- 
tion, and against the position of the army, which 
thereupon marched into London ; and on Decem- 
ber 6, Colonel Pride carried through the famous 
" Pride's Purge." He stood with a military guard 
at the door of the House, and turned back or 
arrested the members who had voted for a con- 
tinuation of the negotiations with the King. 
This was, of course, a purely revolutionary 
measure, with no warrant, save as Ireton and 
Harrison — the Republican generals — had said, 



The Second Civil War 131 

"the height of necessity to save the Kingdom 
from a new War." It was but the second step; 
the all-important one had been taken long before, 
when the army first marched into London to see 
that the Parliament did its liking. 

Cromwell still strove to save the King's life. 
Through the exertions of Ireton a small majority 
of the army council resolved for mercy, and made 
a last effort to conclude a treaty with the King; 
but the King would not listen to them, and he 
thus put it out of their power any longer to delay 
his fate. On January 1, 1649, the House of 
Commons resolved to try him for treason to the 
kingdom. The Lords refused to pass the ordi- 
nance, whereupon the House of Commons decided 
to disregard them and to act on its own authority. 
On January 6 it erected a High Court of Justice 
for the trial of the King, on the ground that he had 
wickedly endeavored to subvert the people's 
rights, had levied war against them, and when he 
had been spared had again raised new commo- 
tions in order to enslave and destroy the nation. 
Cromwell had finally thrown his doubts to the 
winds, and he supported the resolution with all 
his vigor. When the legality of the action was 
questioned, he retorted: "I tell you we will cut 
off his head with the crown upon it!" The grim 
Puritan leaders were at last to have their will on 
"the man of blood." On the 27th, sentence of 



132 Oliver Cromwell 

death was passed upon the King, and on January 
30, 1649, he was beheaded on the scaffold in front 
of Whitehall, meeting his death with firm dignity. 

Justice was certainly done, and until the death 
penalty is abolished for all malefactors, we need 
waste scant sympathy on the man who so hated 
the upholders of freedom that his vengeance 
against Eliot could be satisfied only with Eliot's 
death; who so utterly lacked loyalty that he 
signed the death-warrant of Strafford when Straf- 
ford had merely done his bidding ; who had made 
the blood of Englishmen flow like water, to estab- 
lish his right to rule as he saw best over their lives 
and property ; and who, with incurable duplicity, 
incurable double-dealing, had sought to turn the 
generosity of his victorious foes to their own hurt. 

Any man who has ever had anything to do with 
the infliction of the death penalty, or indeed with 
any form of punishment, knows that there are sen- 
timental beings so constituted that their sympa- 
thies are always most keenly aroused on behalf of 
the offender who pays the penalty for a deed of 
peculiar atrocity. The explanation probably is 
that the more conspicuous the crime, the more 
their attention is arrested, and the more acute 
their manifestations of sympathy become. At 
the time when the great bulk even of civilized 
mankind believed in the right of a king, not 
merely to rule, but to oppress, the action of the 



The Second Civil War 133 

Puritans struck horror throughout Europe. Even 
Republican Holland was stirred to condemnation, 
and as the King was the symbol of the State, and 
as custom dies hard, generations passed during 
which the great majority of good and loyal, but 
not particularly far-sighted or deep-thinking men, 
spoke with intense sympathy of Charles, and with 
the most sincere horror of the regicides, especially 
Cromwell. This feeling was most natural then. 
It may be admitted to be natural in certain Eng- 
lishmen, even at the present day. But what shall 
we say of Americans who now take the same view ; 
who erect stained-glass windows in a Philadelphia 
church to the memory of the "Royal Martyr," or 
in New York or Boston hold absurd festivals in his 
praise? 

The best men in England approved the execu- 
tion of the King, not only as a work of necessity, 
but as right on moral grounds. Two weeks after 
the execution, Milton — perhaps the loftiest soul 
in the whole Puritan party, full though it was of 
lofty souls — wrote his pamphlet justifying the 
right of the nation to depose, or, if need be, exe- 
cute, tyrants and wicked kings. His arguments 
never have been, and never can be, successfully 
controverted on grounds of justice and morality. 
There is room for greater question on the ground 
of expediency. Some of the ablest historians and 
politicians have argued that the execution was a 



134 Oliver Cromwell 

mistake, as making the King a martyr, and as 
transferring to his son, Charles II., all the loyalty 
that had been his, while the hatred and distrust 
could not be transferred. Yet, it certainly seems 
that even on the score of expediency, Cromwell 
and the regicides were right and that the event 
justified their judgment. While Charles was alive 
there could have been no peace in any event ; and 
during Cromwell's lifetime Charles II. could gain 
no foothold in England — for there was never a 
member of the House of Stuart that could stand 
in battle or in council before the stern Lord of the 
English Commonwealth. If in later years great 
Oliver could only have managed to agree with 
the bulk of liberty-loving Englishmen on some 
system of government by law, it is not probable 
that the memory of the King's death would have 
prevented the perpetuation of such a government. 
Carlyle's mind is often warped ; his vision often 
dim ; but there are times when he speaks like an 
inspired seer, and never more so than when dealing 
with the execution of the Stuart King: "This 
action of the English Regicides did in effect strike 
a damp-like death through the heart of Flunkyism 
universally in this world. Whereof Flunkyism, 
Cant, Cloth-Worship, or whatever ugly name it 
have, has gone about incurably sick ever since; 
and is now at length, in these generations, very 
rapidly dying. The like of which action will not 



The Second Civil War 135 

be needed for a thousand years again. . . . Thus 
ends the Second Civil War. In Regicide; in a 
Commonwealth, and Keepers of the Liberties of 
England. In punishment of delinquents; in 
abolition of Cobwebs — if it be possible in a Gov- 
ernment of Heroism and Veracity; at lowest of 
Anti-Flunkyism, Anti-Cant, and the endeavor after 
Heroism and Veracity." 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE IRISH AND SCOTCH WARS. 



THE successful Revolutionary party now 
enacted that the people of England and 
of all the dominions and territories there- 
unto belonging were constituted and established 
as a Commonwealth, or Free State, to be governed 
by the representatives of the people in Parliament 
and by whomsoever the Parliament should ap- 
point as officers and ministers ; the King and the 
House of Lords being both abolished. No provi- 
sion was at first made by which any man should 
lawfully be recognized as chief in the new Com- 
monwealth; but, as a matter of fact, there was 
one man, and one man only, who had to be 
acknowledged, however unwillingly, as master 
and leader. There were many upright and able 
civil servants; many high-minded and fervent 
reformers; many grim and good captains: but 
waist-high above them all rose the mighty and 
strenuous figure of Oliver Cromwell. It may 
well be that, hitherto, personal ambition had 
played an entirely subordinate part in all his 
actions. Now, in the turmoil of the Revolution, 
in the whirlpool of currents which none but the 
strongest man could breast, he became ever more 

136 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 137 

and more conscious of his own great powers — 
powers which he knew were shared by no other 
man. With the sense of power came the over- 
mastering desire to seize and wield it. 

The first thing he had to do was to stop the 
Revolution where it was. In every such Revo- 
lution some of the original adherents of the move- 
ment drop off at each stage, feeling that it has 
gone too far ; and at every halt the extremists in- 
sist on further progress. As stage succeeds stage, 
these extremists become a constantly diminishing 
body, and the irritation and alarm of the growing 
remainder increase. If the movement is not 
checked at the right moment by the good sense 
and moderation of the people themselves, or if 
some master-spirit does not appear, the extremists 
carry it ever farther forward until it provokes the 
most violent reaction ; and when the master-spirit 
does stop it, he has to guard against both the men 
who think it has gone too far, and the men who 
think it has not gone far enough. 

The extreme Levellers, the extreme Republi- 
cans, and, above all, the fierce and moody fanatics 
who sought after an impossible, and for the 
matter of that a highly undesirable, realization of 
their ideal of God's kingdom on this earth — all 
these, together with the mere men of unsettled 
minds and the believers in what we now call com- 
munism, socialism, and nihilism, were darkly 



138 Oliver Cromwell 

threatening the new government. Men arose 
who called themselves prophets of new social 
and religious dispensations; and every wild 
theory found its fanatic advocates, ready at 
any moment to turn from advocacy to action. In 
the name of political and social liberty, some 
demanded that all men should be made free and 
equal by abolishing money and houses, living in 
tents, and dividing all food and clothing alike. 
In the name of religious reform others took to 
riding naked in the market-place, "for a sign"; 
to shouting for the advent of King Jesus; or to 
breaking up church services by noisy controver- 
sies with the preachers. The extreme Anabaptist 
and Quaker agitators were overshadowed by fan- 
tastic figures whose followers hailed them as in- 
carnations of the Most High. 

Black trouble gloomed without. The Com- 
monwealth had not a friend in Europe. In the 
British Isles Scotland declared for Charles II. as 
the King, not only of Scotland, but of Great 
Britain. In Ireland but a couple of towns were 
held for the Parliament. 

It was to the reconquest of Ireland that the 
Commonwealth first addressed itself, and naturally 
Cromwell was chosen for the work. He was 
given the rank of Lieutenant-General ; but before 
he started he had to deal with dangerous mutinies 
and uprisings in the army. The religious sec- 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 139 

taries and political levellers, who had given to the 
army the fiery zeal that made it irresistible by 
Parliament or King, English Royalists or Scotch 
Covenanter, had also been infected with a spirit 
peculiarly liable to catch flame from such agita- 
tions as were going on roundabout. Here and 
there, in regiment after regiment, were sudden 
upliftings of the banner of revolt in the name of 
every kind of human freedom, and often of some 
fierce religious doctrine quite incompatible with 
human freedom. Cromwell acted with his usual 
terrible energy, scattered the mutineers, shot the 
ringleaders, and reduced army and kingdom alike 
to obedience and order. Then he made ready for 
the invasion of Ireland. 

The predominant motives for the various muti- 
nies in the army, offer sufficient proof of its utter 
unlikeness to any other army. At the outset of 
the civil wars the Ironsides were simply volun- 
teers of the very highest type ; not wholly unlike, 
at least in moral qualities, some of those belated 
Cromwellians — the Boers of to-day. They did not 
take up soldiering as a profession, but primarily to 
achieve certain definite moral objects. Of course, 
as the force gradually grew into a permanent body, 
it changed in some respects; but the old spirit 
remained strong. The soldiers became in a sense 
regulars; but they bore no resemblance to regu- 
lars of the ordinary type — to regulars such as 



140 Oliver Cromwell 

served under Turenne or Marlborough, Frederick 
the Great or Wellington. If in Grant's army 
a very large number of the men, including almost 
all the forceful, natural leaders, had been of the 
stamp of Ossawatomie Brown, we should have 
had an army much like Cromwell's. Such an 
army might usually be a power for good and 
sometimes a power for evil; but under all cir- 
cumstances, when controlled by a master hand, 
it was certain to show itself one of the most for- 
midable weapons ever forged in the workshop of 
human passion and purpose. 

Matters in Ireland were in a perfect welter of 
confusion. Eight years had elapsed since the 
original rising of the native Irish. A murderous 
and butcherly warfare had been carried on 
throughout these years, but not along the lines of 
original division. On the contrary, when Crom- 
well landed, there had been a complete shifting 
of the parties to the contest, every faction having 
in turn fought every other faction, and, more 
extraordinary still, having at some time or other 
joined its religious foes in attacking a rival faction 
of its own creed. The original rising was in 
Ulster, and was aimed at the English and Scotch 
settlers who had been planted under James in the 
lands from which the Irish had been evicted. 
These "plantations" under James, not to speak 
of the scourge of Went worth under Charles, were 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 141 

on a par with the whole conduct of the English 
toward Ireland for generations, and gave as ample 
a justification for the uprising as in the Nether- 
lands the Spaniards had given the Dutch. From 
the standpoint of the Irish, the war was simply 
the most righteous of wars — for hearthstone, for 
Church, and for country. 

This first uprising was one of Celtic Catholics. 
In the Pale and elsewhere, here and there through- 
out Ireland, were large numbers of Old-English 
Catholics; these, unlike the Celts, did not wish 
separation from England, but did wish complete 
religious liberty for themselves, and, if possible, 
Catholic supremacy. The Episcopalian and Roy- 
alist English throughout Ireland, under the lead 
of the Earl of Ormond, favored the King. The 
Puritan oligarchy of Dublin favored the Parlia- 
ment, and were in touch with the Scotch Presby- 
terians of Ulster. The rising began to spread 
from Ulster southward. The Catholics of the 
Pale were at first loyal to the King, but the Prot- 
estant leaders, in striking back at the insurgents, 
harried friend and foe alike, until the Pale joined 
with Ulster. After this, all Ireland revolted. 
Only a few fortified and garrisoned towns were 
held for the English. 

Violent alterations of policy and of fortune 
followed. Under the lead of the Roman Catholic 
clergy the revolt was consolidated. Unswerving 



J 42 Oliver Cromwell 

loyalty to the King was proclaimed, war was de- 
nounced against the Puritans, and the reestablish- 
ment of Roman Catholicism as the state religion 
of Ireland was demanded. On the Puritan side 
the lords justices in Dublin nominally acknowl- 
edged the King's authority, but really stood for 
the Parliament and hampered Ormond, who, 
while a stanch Protestant, was an ardent Royalist. 
Ormond gained one or two victories over the 
insurgents in spite of the way in which the lords 
justices interfered with him. Charles created him 
marquis, and he took command of the English 
interest, drove out the lords justices, and con- 
cluded a truce for one year with the Catholic 
party, in September, 1643. They gave Charles a 
free contribution of £30,000, and sent over some 
Irish troops to aid Montrose and the other Roy- 
alist leaders in Scotland, besides setting Ormond 
free to transfer part of his forces to the King in 
England. But Munro and the Ulster Scotch 
refused to recognize the armistice, took the Cove- 
nant, and declared against the King; while, in 
the south, certain Protestant sea-coast towns, 
under the lead of Lord Inchiquin, followed suit 
and acknowledged the Parliament. Months of 
tortuous negotiations followed, King Charles 
showing the same readiness in promise, and utter 
indifference in performance, while dealing with 
the Irish as while dealing with the English. The 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 143 

treachery of the King was made manifest by the 
discovery of his secret treaty with the Irish, when 
Sligo was captured. 

Meanwhile, the Papal nuncio, an Italian, had 
arrived, and exhorted the Irish to refuse any peace 
with the King except on the basis of the complete 
reinstatement of the Catholic Church. He roused 
what would now be called the Ultramontanes 
against the moderate Catholic party which was 
acting with Ormond. Their wrangles caused a 
fatal delay, for by the time the moderates tri- 
umphed the King had been made a prisoner. 
Their treaty of peace with the King was not 
signed till September, 1645, and it amounted to 
nothing, for the adherents of the Parliament re- 
jected it on the one side, and the extreme Catholic 
party, the utterly intolerant and fanatical Catho- 
lics, under the nuncio, refused to be bound by it 
on the other. In the north the Irish were led by 
Owen O'Neil, a member of the great Ulster house 
of that name, and under him they had beaten 
Munro and the Scotch. He now hurried to the 
support of the nuncio. The moderate Catholic 
leaders and Ormond fled to Dublin at his ap- 
proach, and he was joined, after some hesitation, 
by Preston, the leader of the Irish forces in the 
south. In 1647, Ormond, at his wits' end, 
handed over Dublin to the agents of the Parlia- 
ment, and joined the Royalist refugees in France. 



i44 Oliver Cromwell 

This for a moment eliminated the Royalists, 
and left the party of the nuncio, the party of the 
bigots and intolerant extremists, supreme among 
the Irish. But when Jones, the Puritan leader, 
marched out of Dublin, and defeated Preston, 
while in the south Lord Inchiquin won some 
butchering victories, the party of the moderates 
again raised its head. Then there was a new and 
bewildering turn of the kaleidoscope. Inchiquin 
suddenly became offended with the Parliament, 
made overtures to Preston, and then to Ormond. 
A coalition was formed between the Royalist 
Protestants in Munster and the moderate Catho- 
lics. The nuncio threatened the moderates with 
excommunication and interdict, and fled to 
O' Neil's camp. Preston and Inchiquin joined 
forces and marched against O'Neil, so that civil 
war broke out among the insurgents them- 
selves. 

Colonel Jones, the victor over Preston, felt 
doubtful of his own troops, who included a num- 
ber of Royalists, and, extraordinary to relate, he 
actually made terms with the nuncio and O'Neil 
as against the Protestant Royalists and moderate 
Catholics — the Ultramontanes so hating the mod- 
erate Catholics that they preferred to come to 
terms with the Puritans. Ormond now came over 
from France to head the moderates, the party of 
the Royalist Catholics and Protestants. Peace 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 145 

was declared between Ormond and the Supreme 
Council of Dublin in the King's name. 

But hardly had peace been declared when news 
arrived of the King's execution. Ormond pro- 
claimed Charles II., at Cork; most of the Irish 
outside of Ulster united under him, and Munro 
and the Scotch Presbyterians joined him. The 
nuncio fled the country in despair. The rupture 
between the Presbyterians and Independents was 
complete, and the Scotch became the open enemies 
of the English. They began the siege of Deny, 
which Coote held for the Parliament. At the 
same time they confronted O'Neil and the Ulster 
Irish, who were acting in alliance with Monk, 
who held Dundalk for the Parliament by order of 
Colonel Jones. Inchiquin captured Drogheda 
for the Confederates. Monk's garrison mutinied, 
and he had to surrender Dundalk. Ormond 
began the siege of Dublin, but was routed by 
Jones, one of the sturdiest of the many sturdy 
Puritan fighters. Meanwhile, the Puritan Parlia- 
ment had disavowed the alliance with O'Neil and 
the Ulster Irish, and the latter were thus forced 
into the arms of Ormond, who found himself at 
the head of all the Irish and English Catholics, 
of the Scotch Presbyterians in Ulster, and of the 
Royalist Protestants elsewhere in Ireland. It was 
at this time that Cromwell landed. 

The exact condition of affairs in Ireland should 
10 



146 Oliver Cromwell 

be carefully borne in mind, because it is often 
alleged, in excuse of Cromwell's merciless massa- 
cres, that he was acting with the same justification 
that the English had when they put down the 
Indian Mutiny with righteous and proper severity. 
Without a doubt, Cromwell and most Englishmen 
felt this way; and in the case of the average 
Englishman, who could not be expected to under- 
stand the faction-fighting, the feeling was justi- 
fiable. But it was Cromwell's business to know 
what the parties had been doing. As a matter 
of fact, the wrong of the original Ulster massacre, 
which itself avenged prior wrongs by the invaders, 
had been overlaid by countless other massacres 
committed by English and Irish alike, during the 
intervening years; and the very men against 
whom this original wrong had been committed 
were now fighting side by side with the wrong- 
doers, against Cromwell and the Puritans. More- 
over, for some time the Parliamentarians had 
been in close alliance with these same wrong- 
doers against the moderate Irish, who were not 
implicated in the massacres in question, and 
against the Royalist Protestants, some of whom 
had suffered from the massacres and others of 
whom had helped avenge them. The troops 
against whom Cromwell was to fight were in part 
Protestant and English, these being mixed in with 
the Catholics and Irish; and at the moment the 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 147 

chief Royalist leaders in Ireland included quite as 
many English, Scotch, and Irish Protestants, as 
they did Irish Catholics. 

Cromwell recked but little of nice distinctions 
between the different stripes of Royalists and 
Catholics when, in August, 1649, he landed in 
Dublin, the only place in Ireland, save Deny, 
which still held out for the Parliament. He 
brought with him the pick of his troops and soon 
had at Dublin some 10,000 foot and 5,000 horse. 
They were excellently disciplined; they included 
the Ironsides, the veterans of the New Model — 
grim Puritans for the most part, inflamed with 
the most bitter hatred against Catholics, Irish, and 
Royalists. They had been welded into one for- 
midable mass by Cromwell's rigid discipline, and 
yet were all aflame with religious and political 
enthusiasm. There could not be gathered in all 
Ireland an army capable of meeting in the open 
field that iron soldiery, under such a leader as 
Cromwell ; and this the Irish chiefs well knew. 

Cromwell, therefore, had to deal with a nume- 
rous and individually brave but badly disciplined 
enemy, formidable in guerilla warfare, because 
theirs was a wild country of mountain and bog, 
and resolute in defense of their walled towns, but 
not otherwise to be feared by such troops as the 
Ironsides. His first care was to put an end to the 
plundering and licentiousness which had hitherto 



148 Oliver Cromwell 

marked the English no less than the Irish armies. 
He completely stopped outrages upon the peas- 
antry and non-combatants generally, besides pro- 
tecting all who lived quietly in their homes. 

In September he marched against Drogheda, 
into which Ormond had thrown 3,000 picked 
men, largely English, under Sir Arthur Aston. 
Cromwell had with him some 8,000 men when 
he sat down to attack it. He brought up a siege- 
train, beating back the sallies of the garrison with 
ease, and meanwhile maintaining his strict disci- 
pline, and putting down pillage by the summary 
process of hanging the plunderers. 

When his batteries were ready he summoned 
the Governor to surrender, but the summons was 
refused. For two days the guns kept up their 
fire, and then in the afternoon the assault was 
delivered. The defenders met the stormers in the 
breaches ; the fight was hot and stiff ; the English 
were once repulsed, but came forward again and 
carried the breach only to be once more driven 
out by a fierce rally. 

When Cromwell saw his men driven down the 
breach, he placed himself at the head of the 
reserve, and in person led it with the rallied men 
of the broken regiments, back to the breach. 
This time the stormers would not be denied. 
They carried the breach, the church — which was 
strongly held by the Irish — and finally the pali- 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 149 

saded intrenchments of Mill Mount, in which Sir 
Arthur Aston had taken refuge. The horse fol- 
lowed close behind the foot, and speedily cleared 
the streets of the hostile cavalry and infantry. 
The victorious Puritans pressed on and a terrible 
slaughter followed. Cromwell forbade them to 
spare any that were in arms in the town, and they 
put to the sword over 2,000 men. Nearly 1,000 
were killed in the great Church of St. Peter's. 
"All the priests found," says Cromwell, "were 
knocked on the head promiscuously but two, 
both of whom were killed next day." Sir Arthur 
Aston, Verney, the son of the King's standard- 
bearer at Edgehill, and all the officers were put 
to the sword. Two towers held out until next 
day, when they submitted; their officers were 
"knocked on the head," says Cromwell. One 
tower fought hard ; there every tenth man of the 
soldiers was killed ; the rest, and all the soldiers 
in the other tower, were shipped to the white 
slavery of the Barbadoes. Of the assailants, 
about a hundred were slain and several hundred 
wounded. 

Said Cromwell: "We put to the sword the 
whole number of the defendants. . . . This hath 
been a marvellous great mercy. I wish that all 
honest hearts may give glory of this to God 
alone, to whom indeed the praise of this mercy 
belongs. ... I am persuaded that this is a 



150 Oliver Cromwell 

righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous 
wretches who have imbrued their hands in so 
much innocent blood, and that it will tend to 
prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which 
are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which 
otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret. 
The officers and soldiers of this garrison were the 
flower of their army." 

Cromwell's defenders say simply that he acted 
from a fervent belief in the righteousness of what 
he was doing, and, further, that the terrible ven- 
geance he took here and at Wexford upon all 
who withstood him in arms cowed the Irish and 
prevented further resistance. Neither defense is 
tenable. If on the ground of their sincerity the 
deeds of Cromwell and his soldiers at Drogheda 
and Wexford can be defended, then we cannot 
refuse the same defense to Philip and Alva and 
their soldiers in the Netherlands. Of course, we 
must always remember that under Cromwell 
there was no burning at the stake, no dreadful 
torture in cold blood ; and, therefore, at his worst, 
he rises in degree above Philip and Alva. But 
in kind, his deeds in Ireland were the same as 
theirs in the Netherlands; and though the Puri- 
tan soldiers were guiltless of the hideous licen- 
tiousness shown by the Spaniards, or by the 
armies of Tilly and Wallenstein, yet the merci- 
less butchery of the entire garrisons and of all the 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 151 

priests — accompanied by the slaughter of other 
non-combatants, in at least some cases — leave 
Drogheda and Wexford as black and terrible 
stains on Cromwell's character. Nor is there any 
justification for them on the ground that they put 
a stop to resistance. The war lingered on for 
two or three years in spite of them; and in any 
event the outcome was inevitable. It does not 
seem to have been hastened in any way by this 
display of savagery. There had been many such 
butcheries during the war, before Cromwell came 
to Ireland, without in any way hastening the 
end. Cromwell and his lieutenants put down the 
insurrection and established order because they 
gained such sweeping victories, not because Crom- 
well made merciless use of his first victories. It 
was the fighting of the Puritan troops in the 
battle itself which won, and not their ferocity after 
the battle; and it was Cromwell who not merely 
gave free rein to this ferocity, but inspired it. 
Seemingly quarter would have been freely given 
had it not been for his commands. Neither in 
morals nor in policy were these slaughters justifi- 
able. Moreover, it must be remembered that the 
men slaughtered were entirely guiltless of the 
original massacres in Ulster. 

Immediately after Drogheda, Cromwell sent 
forces to Dundalk, which was held by the Irish, 
and to Trim, which was held by the Scotch ; but 



152 Oliver Cromwell 

the garrisons deserted both places at the approach 
of the Cromwellians. In October, Cromwell him- 
self advanced on Wexford and stormed the town. 
Very little resistance was made, but some 2,000 
of the defenders were put to the sword. This 
time the soldiers needed no order with reference 
to refusing quarter; they acted of their own 
accord, and many of the townspeople suffered 
with the garrison. Practically, the town was de- 
populated, not one in twenty of the inhabitants 
being left. 

Then Cromwell moved to Ross. In spite of 
the slaughter which he made in the towns he 
stormed, he exercised such strict discipline over 
his army in the field, and paid with such rigid 
punctuality for all supplies which the country 
people brought in, that they flocked to him as 
they feared to do to their own armies, and in con- 
sequence his troops were better fed and able to 
march more rapidly than was the case with the 
Irish. He soon took Ross, allowing the garrison 
to march out with the honors of war, and gave 
protection to the inhabitants. When asked to 
guarantee freedom of religion he responded: 
" For that which you mention concerning liberty 
of conscience, I meddle not with any man's con- 
science. But, if by liberty of conscience, you 
mean liberty to exercise the mass, I judge it best 
to use plain dealing, and to let you know, where 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 153 

the Parliament of England have power, that will 
not be allowed of." 

Three months after he landed, Cromwell had 
possession of almost all the eastern coast. One 
of the remarkable features of his campaign had 
been the way in which he had used the army and 
the fleet in combination. He used his admirals 
just as he had used his generals and colonels, and 
they played a very important part in the opera- 
tions against Wexford and Ross, and in securing 
the surrender of both. When he moved away 
from the coast his task was very difficult ; there 
were no roads, the country had been harried into 
a wilderness, and was studded with castles and 
fortified towns, every one held by an Irish garri- 
son. Ormond and O'Neil were in the field with 
a more numerous force than his ; and though they 
dared not fight a pitched battle, they threatened 
his detachments. The service was very wearing, 
and in December Cromwell went into winter 
quarters, the weather being bad, and his men 
decimated by fever. The triumphs won by his 
terrible soldiership rendered the conquest of the 
whole island only a question of time. 

Having now a little leisure, Cromwell pub- 
lished, for the benefit of the Irish, a "Declara- 
tion," as an answer to a polemic issued in form of 
a manifesto at Kilkenny by the high Irish eccle- 
siastics. In this Declaration, which is very 



154 Oliver Cromwell 

curious reading, he exhorted the Irish to submit, 
and answered at great length the arguments of 
their religious leaders, with all the zeal, ingenuity, 
and acrimony of an eager theological disputant, 
and with an evident and burning sincerity to which 
many theological disputants do not attain. The 
religious side of his campaigns was always very 
strong in his mind, and no Puritan preacher more 
dearly loved setting forth the justification of his 
religious views, or answering the arguments of his 
religious opponents, whether Catholics or Cove- 
nanters. 

So far as Puritanism was based upon a literal 
following of the example set in the Old Testa- 
ment, it had a very dark, as well as a very exalted 
side. To take the inhuman butcheries of the 
early Jews as grateful to Jehovah, and therefore 
as justification for similar conduct by Christians, 
could lead only to deeds of horror. When Crom- 
well wrote from Cork, justifying the Puritan zeal 
which he admitted could not be justified by 
" reason if called before a jury," he appealed to the 
case of Phineas, who was held to have done the 
work of the Lord, because he thrust through the 
belly with his javelin the wretched Midianitish 
woman. No such plea can be admitted on behalf 
of peoples who have passed the stage of mere 
barbarism. 

Drogheda and Wexford could not be excused 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 155 

by pointing out that the priests of the Jews of old 
had held it grateful to the Lord to kill without 
mercy the miserable women and children of the 
tribes whom the Israelites drove from the land. 
Such a position was in accord with the medieval 
side of Cromwell's character, but was utterly out 
of touch with his thoroughly modern belief in 
justice and freedom for all men. Queer contra- 
dictions appear in the above-mentioned " Declara- 
tion," written, as he phrased it, "For the unde- 
ceiving of deluded and seduced people." He 
showed that he was a leader in the modern move- 
ment for social, political, and religious liberty, 
when he wrote: "Arbitrary power men begin to 
grow weary of, in Kings and Churchmen; their 
juggle between them mutually to uphold civil 
and ecclesiastical tyranny begins to be trans- 
parent. Some have cast off both; and hope by 
the Grace of God to keep so. Others are at it." 
But when he came to reconcile his own declara- 
tions for religious liberty with his previous refusal 
to permit the celebration of the mass, he was 
forced into a purely technical justification of his 
position. He announced that he would punish, 
with all the severity of the law, priests "seducing 
the people, or, by any overt act, violating the 
laws established," but added: "As for the people 
what thoughts they have in matters of religion in 
their own breasts, I cannot reach ; but shall think 



156 Oliver Cromwell 

it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably, 
not to cause them in the least to suffer for the 
same." In other words, Catholics could believe 
what they wished, but were not allowed to profess 
their beliefs in the form that they desired, or to 
have their teachers among them. To our Amer- 
ican eyes such a position is so wholly untenable, 
so shocking to the moral sense, that it requires 
an effort to remember that it was in advance of 
the position taken in the next century by the 
English toward the Irish through their Penal 
Laws, and of the position taken in France toward 
the Protestants during the latter part of the reign 
of Louis XIV. and all the reign of Louis XV., 
while of course it was infinitely beyond the theory 
upon which the temporal and spiritual authorities 
of Spain acted. 

While the Irish campaign was at its height, the 
Scotch, who had declared for Charles II., made 
ready for war, and the English Parliament de- 
manded Cromwell's return. For some months, 
however, he remained in Ireland, capturing Kil- 
kenny and various other towns and castles and 
constantly extending the area of English sway, 
driving the Irish westward. His campaign was 
a model for all military operations undertaken in 
a difficult country, covered by a network of forti- 
fied places, and held by masses of guerillas or 
irregular levies, backed by the whole population 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 157 

After Clonmel was taken he handed over the com- 
mand to Ireton ; the heavy work had been done, 
and what remained to do was tedious and harass- 
ing rather than formidable, while the Scotch busi- 
ness could no longer wait. 

In May, 1650, Cromwell landed in England, 
took his seat in the House of Commons, and was 
made Captain-General and Commander-in-Chief 
of the forces, Fairfax having refused to take part 
in any offensive campaign against the Covenant- 
ers. It is recorded that when Cromwell entered 
London, greeted by surging multitudes, someone 
called his attention to the way the people turned 
out to do him honor for his triumph ; whereupon 
he dryly answered that it was nothing to the way 
they would turn out to see him hanged. 

The refusal of Fairfax to march against the 
Scotch left Cromwell the only hope of the Com- 
monwealth. It cannot too often be repeated that, 
whether in the end Cromwell's ambitions did or 
did not obscure the high principles with which 
they certainly blended, yet he rose to supreme 
power less by his own volition than by the irresist- 
ible march of events, and because he was "a man^, 
of the mighty days, and equal to the days." In 
this world, in the long run, the job must neces- 
sarily fall to the man who both can and will do it 
when it must be done, even though he does it 
roughly or imperfectly. It is well enough to' 



158 Oliver Cromwell 

deplore and to strive against the conditions which 
make it necessary to do the job ; but when once 
face to face with it, the man who fails either in 
power or will, the man who is half-hearted, reluc- 
tant, or incompetent, must give way to the actual 
doer, and he must not complain because the doer 
gets the credit and reward. President Buchanan 
utterly disbelieved in the right of secession, but 
he also felt doubts as to its being constitutional or 
possible to "coerce a sovereign state," and there- 
fore he and those who thought like him had to 
give place to men who felt no such doubts. It 
may be the highest duty to oppose a war before 
it is brought on, but once the country is at war, 
the man who fails to support it with all possible 
heartiness comes perilously near being a traitor, 
and his conduct can only be justified on grounds 
which in time of peace would justify a revolution. 
The whole strength of the English Commonwealth 
was in the Independents. Royalists, Episcopa- 
lians, Presbyterians, extreme Levellers, were all 
against it. When the Scotch declared for Charles 
II. as king, not only of Scotland but of England, 
they rendered it necessary that either England or 
Scotland should be conquered. Fairfax declared 
that he was willing to defend the English against 
the Scotch attack, but not to attack Scotland. 
The position was puerile ; a fact which should be 
borne in mind by the excellent persons who at the 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 159 

present day believe that a nation can be somehow 
armed for defense without being armed for attack. 
No fight was ever yet won by parrying alone ; hard 
hitting is the best parry ; the offensive is the only 
sure defensive. To refuse to attack the Scotch 
was merely to give them a great initial advantage 
in the inevitable struggle. Cromwell was far too 
clear-sighted and resolute to suffer from over- 
sentimental scruples in the matter. Accordingly 
he undertook the task ; did it with his accustomed 
thoroughness; and from that moment became, 
not merely the first man in the kingdom, but a 
man without a second or a third, without a rival 
of any kind. 

Charles had landed in Scotland and been pro- 
claimed king, but was forced not merely to take 
the Covenant but to make degrading professions 
of abandonment and renunciation of his father's 
acts and principles. He was, after all, to be a 
king only in name, if the dominant party in Scot- 
land could have its way. Dour as Dopper Boers, 
the Covenanters were determined that the govern- 
ment should be, though in form royal, in essence 
a democratic theocracy, where the men of the 
strictest Calvinistic sect should all have their say 
in an administration marked by the most bitter in- 
tolerance of every religious belief which differed 
by even a shade from their own. To get real 
religious liberty in those days one had to go to 



160 Oliver Cromwell 

Rhode Island or Maryland; but at least the 
English Puritans were, in this respect, far in 
advance of the men against whom they were 
pitted. 

There was also a Royalist party in Scotland, 
which had scant sympathy with the Covenanters, 
but was only allowed to exist at all by their suf- 
ferance. When at this time Montrose landed to 
help the King, the Presbyterian friends of the 
King promptly overcame and slew him. The 
Kirk was supreme, and in the army which it 
gathered to meet Cromwell it made zeal for the 
Covenant the all-important requirement for a 
commission. It would not even permit places of 
command to be given to the officers who had 
marched with Hamilton's army. The Royalists 
around the King complained bitterly that the 
commissions were most apt to go to sons of min- 
isters, and if not, then to men whose godliness 
and religious enthusiasm were but poor substitutes 
for training and skill in arms. Cromwell's sol- 
diers possessed all of these qualities. Devotion to 
country or to religion adds immensely to the effi- 
ciency of a soldier, but is a broken reed by itself. 
Officers whose only qualifications are religious or 
patriotic zeal, are better than officers who seek 
service to gratify their vanity, or who are ap- 
pointed through political favor; but until they 
have really learned their business, and unless they 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 161 

are eager and able to learn it, this is all that can 
be said of them. 

Cromwell marched north to the walls of Edin- 
burgh, where David Leslie lay with the Covenant- 
ing army of the Kirk. Leslie had fought under 
Gustavus Adolphus, and beside Cromwell at 
. Marston Moor, where the Scotch insisted that 
they had saved the Cromwellians from defeat. 
Now the two sides were decisively to test the 
question of supremacy. But the contest was 
really utterly unequal. Cromwell had a veteran 
army, one which had been kept under arms for 
years. 

Leslie had an army which had been brought to- 
gether for this particular war. He was, therefore, 
under the terrible disadvantage which rests on any 
man who, with raw volunteers, confronts well- 
trained, well-led veterans. There were under him 
plenty of officers and men with previous military 
experience — though, as the Royalist above quoted 
remarked, too many of the officers were "sancti- 
fied creatures who hardly ever saw or heard of 
any sword but that of the Spirit" — yet the regi- 
ments were all new, and the men had no regi- 
mental pride or confidence, no knowledge of how 
to act together, no trust in one another or in their 
commanders; while Cromwell's regiments were 
old, and the recruits in each at once took their 
tone from the veterans around them. 
ii 



162 Oliver Cromwell 

Although Leslie's force was twice that of Crom- 
well's, he knew his trade too well to risk a stricken 
field on equal terms, when the soldiers were of 
such unequal quality. He accordingly intrenched 
in a strong position covering Edinburgh, and there 
awaited the English attack. Cromwell was a born 
fighter, always anxious for the trial of the sword ; 
a man who habitually took castles and walled 
towns by storm, himself at need heading the 
stormers, and who won his pitched battles by the 
shock of his terrible cavalry, which he often led 
in person, and which invariably ruined any foe 
whom he had overthrown. He now advanced 
with too much confidence and found himself in 
a very ugly situation ; his men sickening rapidly 
while Leslie's army increased in numbers and dis- 
cipline. Like every great commander, Cromwell 
realized that the end of all maneuvering is to fight 
— that the end of strategy should be the crushing 
overthrow in battle of the enemy's forces. On 
this occasion his eagerness made him forget his 
caution ; and all his masterly skill was needed to 
extricate him from the position into which he had 
been plunged by his own overbearing courage and 
the wariness of his opponent. 

For some time he lay before Edinburgh, unable 
to get Leslie to fight, and of course unwilling to 
attack him in his intrenchments. Sickness and 
lack of provisions finally forced him to retreat. 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 163 

He believed that this would draw Leslie out of 
his works, and his belief was justified by the event. 
The English now mustered some 11,000 men; 
the Scotch, 2 2 ,000. Leslie was still cautious about 
fighting, but the ministers of the Kirk, who were 
with him in great numbers, hurried him on. He 
followed Cromwell to Dunbar, where he cut off 
the English retreat to England. But his army was 
on the hills and was suffering from the weather. 
He thought that the discouraged English were 
about to embark on their ships. The ministers 
fiercely urged him to destroy the "sectaries" 
whom they so hated, and in the afternoon of 
December 2 he crowded down toward the lower 
ground, near the sea. 

Cromwell saw with stern joy that at last the 
Scotch had given him the longed-for chance, and 
true to his instincts he at once decided to attack, 
instead of waiting to be attacked. Leslie's troops 
had come down the steep slopes, and at their 
foot were crowded together so that their freedom 
of movement was much impaired. Cromwell 
believed that if their right wing were smashed, 
the left could not come in time to its support. 
He pointed this out to Lambert, who commanded 
his horse, and to Monk, the saturnine tobacco- 
chewing colonel, now a devoted and trusted Crom- 
wellian. Both agreed with Cromwell, and before 
dawn the English army was formed for the 



164 Oliver Cromwell 

onslaught, the officers and troopers praying and 
exhorting loudly. Their cry was: "The Lord of 
Hosts!" that of their Presbyterian foes: "The 
Covenant!" It was a strange fight, this between | 
the Puritan and the Covenanter, whose likeness 
in the intensity of their religious zeal and in the 
great features of their creeds but embittered their / 
antagonism over the smaller points upon which 
they differed. 

Day dawned, while driving gusts of rain swept 
across the field, and the soldiers on both sides 
stood motionless. Then the trumpets sounded 
the charge, and the English horse, followed by 
the English foot, spurred against the stubborn 
Scottish infantry of Leslie's right wing. The 
masses of Scotch cavalry, with their lancers at the 
head, fell on the English horse — disordered by the 
contest with the infantry — and pushed them back 
into the brook; but they rallied in a moment, as 
the reserves came up, and horse and foot again 
rushed forward to the attack. At this moment 
the sun flamed red over the North Sea, and Crom- 
well shouted aloud, with stern exultation: "Let 
God arise and let His enemies be scattered," and 
a few moments later — ' ' They run ! I profess they 
run!" for now the Scottish army broke in wild 
confusion, though one brigade of foot held their 
ground, fighting the English infantry at push of 
pike and butt-end of musket, until a troop of the 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 165 

victorious horse charged from one end to the 
other, through and through them. 

Cromwell was as terrible in pursuit as in battle. 
He never left a victory half -won, and always fol- 
lowed the fleeing foe, as Sheridan followed the 
Confederates before Appomattox. The English 
horse pressed the fleeing Scotch, and their defeat 
became the wildest rout, their cavalry riding 
through their infantry. Cromwell himself rallied 
and reformed his troopers, who sang as a song of 
praise the hundred and seventeenth psalm; and 
then he again loosed his squadrons on the foe. 
The fight had not lasted an hour, and Cromwell's 
victory cost him very little; but of the Scotch, 
3,000 were put to the sword, chiefly in the pursuit, 
and 10,000 were captured, with 30 guns and 200 
colors. Leslie escaped by the speed of his horse. 
Never had Cromwell won a greater triumph. 
Like Jackson in his Valley Campaigns, though he 
was greatly outnumbered, he struck the foe at 
the decisive point with the numbers all in his own 
favor, and by taking advantage of their error he 
ruined them at a blow. Like most great generals, 
Cromwell's strategy was simple, and in the last 
resort consisted in forcing the enemy to fight on 
terms that rendered it possible thoroughly to 
defeat him; and like all great generals, he had 
an eye which enabled him to take advantage of 
the fleeting opportunities which occur in almost 



166 Oliver Cromwell 

every battle, but which if not instantly grasped 
vanish forever. 

The ruin of the Kirk brought to the front the 
Cavaliers, who still surrounded Charles and were 
resolute to continue the fight. Both before and 
after Dunbar, Cromwell carried on a very curious 
series of theological disputations with the leaders 
of the Kirk party. The letters and addresses of 
the two sides remind one of the times when 
Byzantine emperors exchanged obscure theolog- 
ical taunts with the factions of the Circus. Yet 
this correspondence reveals no little of the secret 
of Cromwell's power; of his intense religious 
enthusiasm — which was both a strength and a 
weakness — his longing for orderly liberty, and his 
half -stifled aspirations for religious freedom. 

He was on sound ground in his controversy 
with the Scottish Kirk. He put the argument 
for religious freedom well when he wrote to the 
Governor of Edinburgh Castle, concerning his 
ecclesiastical opponents: 1 "They assume to be 
the infallible expositors of the Covenant (and of 
the Scriptures), counting a different sense and 
judgment from theirs Breach of Covenant and 
Heresy — no marvel they judge of others so 
authoritatively and severely. But we have not 
so learned Christ. We look at Ministers as helpers 
of, not Lords over, God's people. I appeal to their 

1 Slightly condensed. 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 167 

consciences whether any ' man ' trying their doc- 
trines and dissenting shall not incur the censure 
of Sectary? And what is this but to deny Chris- 
tians their liberty and assume the Infallible Chair? 
What doth (the Pope) do more than this?" 

There is profitable study for many people of 
to-day in the following: "Your pretended fear 
lest error should step in is like the man who would 
keep all the wine out of the country, lest men 
should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and 
unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural 
liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. 
When he doth abuse it, judge. If a man speak 
foolishly, ye suffer him gladly, because ye are wise. 
Stop such a man's mouth by sound words which 
cannot be gainsay ed. If he speak to the disturb- 
ance of the public peace, let the civil magistrate 

punish him." 

After Dunbar, Cromwell could afford to indulge 

in such disputations, for, as he said: "The Kirk 
had done their do." All that remained was to 
deal with the Cavaliers. There is, by the way, a 
delightful touch of the "Trust in the Lord, and 
keep your powder dry!" type in one of his 
letters of this time, when he desired the Com- 
mander at Newcastle to ship him three or four 
score masons, "for we expect that God will sud- 
denly put some places into our hands which we 
shall have occasion to fortify." 



168 Oliver Cromwell 

The fate of the prisoners taken at Dunbar was 
dreadful. War had not learned any of its modern 
mercifulness. Cromwell was in this, as in other 
respects, ahead, and not behind, the times. He 
released half of the prisoners — for the most part 
half -starved, sick, and wounded — and sent the rest 
under convoy southward, praying that humanity 
might be exercised toward them ; but no care was 
taken of them, and four-fifths died from starvation 
and pestilence. 

Meanwhile, a new Scotch army was assembling 
at Stirling, consisting for the most part of the 
Lowland Cavaliers, with their retainers, and the 
Royalist chief from the Highlands, with their 
clansmen. Before acting against them, Cromwell 
broke up the remaining Kirk forces, put down 
the moss-troopers and plunderers, and secured the 
surrender of Edinburgh. Winter came on, and 
operations ceased during the severe weather. 

In the spring of 1651, he resumed his work, 
and by the end of summer he had the Royalists 
in such plight that it was evident that their only 
chance was to abide the hazard of a great effort. 
Early in August Charles led his army across the 
border into England, to see if he could not retrieve 
his cause there, while Cromwell was in Scotland; 
but Cromwell himself promptly followed him, 
while Cromwell's lieutenants in England opposed 
and hampered the march of the Royalists. There 



The Irish and Scotch Wars 169 

was need of resolute action, for Charles had -the 
best Scotch army that had yet been gathered 
together. There was no general rising of the 
English to join him, but, when he reached Wor- 
cester, the town received him with open arms. 
This was the end of his successes. Cromwell came 
up, and after careful preparation, delivered his 
attack, on September 3. Charles had only some 
15,000 men; Cromwell, nearly 30,000, half of 
whom, however, were the militia of the neighbor- 
ing counties, who were not to be compared either 
with Cromwell's own veterans, or with 'their 
Royalist opponents. The fight was fierce, Crom- 
well's left wing gradually driving back the enemy, 
in spite of stubborn resistance; while, on his 
right, the Cavaliers and Highlanders themselves 
vigorously attacked the troops to which they were 
opposed. It was "as stiff a contest for four or 
five hours as ever I have seen," wrote Cromwell 
that evening; but at last he overthrew his foes, 
and, following them with his usual vigor, frightful 
carnage ensued. The victory was overwhelming. 
Charles himself escaped after various remarkable 
adventures, but all the nobles and generals of note 
were killed or taken. Nearly 11,000 men were 
captured, and practically all the remainder were 
slain. 

This was, as Cromwell said, "the crowning 
mercy." It was the last fight of the Civil War; 



170 Oliver Cromwell 

the last time that Cromwell had to lead an army 
in the field. From now till his death there never 
appeared in England a foe it was necessary for 
him to meet in person. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 

AFTER the battle of Worcester, the author- 
ity of the Commonwealth was supreme 
throughout the British Islands. This 
authority as yet reposed, wholly in form, largely 
in substance, with the remnant of the Long Par- 
liament. This remnant, derisively called the 
"rump," differed as widely in power and capacity 
from the Parliament led by Pym and Hampden, 
as the Continental Congress that saw the outgoing 
of the Revolutionary War differed from that 
which saw its incoming. Defections and purg- 
ings, exclusions first of whole-hearted Episcopa- 
lian Royalists and then of half-hearted Presby- 
terian Royalists had reduced it to being but the 
representative of a faction. It had submitted to 
the supremacy of the army by submitting to the 
exclusion of those members to whom the army 
objected. Then it had worked for some time 
hand in hand with the army ; but, now that war 
was over, the Parliamentary representatives of 
the Independents feared more and more the 
supremacy of the military, or Cromwellian, wing 
of their party. It was the army, and not the Par- 
liament, that had won the fight ; that had killed 

171 



172 Oliver Cromwell 

one king, and driven another, his son, into exile; 
that had subdued Scotland and Ireland, and 
stamped out the last vestige of Royalist resistance 
in England. Yet it was the Parliament, and not 
the army, which in theory was to fall heir to the 
royal power. 

Moreover, Parliament, thanks to its past his- 
tory, had become as little as the army the legal 
embodiment of the power of England ; and what 
was more important, there was even less general 
acceptance of it as the proper representative of 
power, than there was general acceptance of the 
army. The army, even where hated, was feared 
and respected; the Parliament was beginning to 
excite no emotion save an angry contempt. 
There were men of honor, of note, and of ability 
still left in the Parliament ; but its vital force was 
dying. 

Conscious of its own weakness before the peo- 
ple, the Parliament was most reluctant to face a 
dissolution ; most eager to devise means by which 
its rule could be perpetuated. The army, no less 
conscious of the hostility felt for it by the Parlia- 
ment, was just as determined that there should be 
a dissolution and an election of a new Parliament. 
In the approaching conflict the army had an im- 
mense advantage, for, while the Parliament was 
losing its grip upon the Independents, without in 
any way attracting strength from the Royalists, 



The Commonwealth 173 

the great mass of the Independents still firmly- 
regarded Cromwell as their especial champion. 

This was the case, not only in England, but 
elsewhere. One of Cromwell's letters of about 
this time is to the New England clergyman, John 
Cotton, in answer to one which showed the keen 
interest taken in Cromwell's triumph by his fellow- 
Puritans, who, across the Atlantic, had begun the 
upbuilding of what is now the giant republic of 
the New World. The letter is marked by the con- 
tinuous use of scriptural phrases and protestations 
of humility, so ostentatious and overstrained as to 
convey an uncomfortable feeling of hypocrisy ; yet, 
without doubt, there was a base of genuineness for 
these expressions. Beyond question, Cromwell 
felt that he was doing the Lord's work ; and was 
sustained through the tremendous hours of labor 
and peril by the sense of battling for justice on 
this earth, and in accordance with the Eternal Will 
of Heaven. 

In dealing with Cromwell and the Puritan 
Revolution it must ever be kept in mind, before 
judging too harshly the actors, that the era saw 
the overlapping of two systems, both in religion 
and in politics; and many incongruities resulted. 
It was the first great stride toward the practical 
achievement of civil rights and individual liberty 
as we now understand them. It was also the era 
in which the old theological theory of the alb 



174 Oliver Cromwell 

importance of dogma came into sharp conflict 
with the now healthily general religious belief in 
the superior importance of conduct. Of course, 
as is invariably the case in real life, the issues 
were not sharply drawn at all points, and at some 
they were wholly obscured by the strong passions 
and ambitions which belong, not to any particular 
age, but to all time. 

After Worcester, when Cromwell had returned 
to London, he one day summoned a conference, 
at Speaker Lenthall's house, of the leaders of the 
Parliamentary army to decide how the national 
destiny was to be settled. He hoped that they 
would be able to form a policy among them- 
selves; but the hope proved fruitless. Some of 
the members wished an absolute republic; some 
wished a setting-up of what we would now call a 
limited monarchy, with one of the late king's sons 
recalled and put at the head. 

Nothing came of the conference, and Parlia- 
ment went its way. It had at last waked to the 
fact that it must do something positive in the 
way of reform, or else that its days were num- 
bered. It began with great reluctance to make a 
pretense of preparing for its own dissolution, and 
strove to accomplish some kind of reform in the 
laws. At that time the law of England had been 
for generations little more than a mass of ingen- 
ious technicalities, and the Court of Chancery had 



The Commonwealth 175 

become the synonym for a system of interminable 
delay, which worked as much injustice as out- 
right spoliation. Even now there is a tendency 
in the law toward the deification of technicalities, 
the substitution of the letter for the spirit ; a ten- 
dency which can only be offset by a Bench, and, 
indeed, a Bar, possessing both courage and com- 
mon sense. At that time, the condition of affairs 
was much worse, and the best men in England 
shared the popular feeling of extreme dislike for 
lawyers, as men whose trade was not to secure 
justice, but to weave a great web of technicalities 
which completely defeated justice. However, 
reform in the methods of legal procedure proved 
as difficult then as it ever has proved, and all that 
even Cromwell could do was to make a beginning 
in the right direction. The Rump was quite 
unable so much as to make this beginning. 

The Parliament obtained a momentary respite 
by creating a diversion in foreign affairs, and 
bringing on a war with the Dutch. Throughout 
the first half of the seventeenth century, the 
Dutch were the leading mercantile and naval 
power of Europe, surpassing the English in trade 
and in colonial possessions. Unfortunately for 
them, their home authorities did not believe in 
preparedness for war; and the crushing defeats 
which the boldness and skill of their sailors had 
enabled them to inflict on the Spaniards, lulled 



176 Oliver Cromwell 

them into the unwholesome faith — shared at 
times by great modern mercantile communities — 
that, by simple desire for peace, they could avert 
war; and that if war came, they could trust to 
their riches and reserve strength to win. Accord- 
ingly, in time of peace they laid up their warships 
and never built a fighting navy in advance, trust- 
ing to the use of armed merchant-vessels and im- 
provised war-craft to meet the need of the hour. 
England, on the contrary, had a large regular 
navy, the ships being superior in size and arma- 
ment to the Dutch, and the personnel of the navy 
being better disciplined, although none of the Eng- 
lish admirals, save Blake, ranked with Tromp and 
De Ruyter. 

The cause of the quarrel was the Navigation 
Act, passed by England for the express purpose 
of building up the English commercial marine at 
the expense of the Dutch. The latter were then 
the world's carriers on the ocean. They derived 
an immense profit from carrying the goods of 
other countries, in their own bottoms, from these 
other countries to England. The Navigation 
Act forbade this, allowing only English bottoms 
to be used to carry goods to England, unless the 
goods were carried in the ships of the country 
from which they came. This is the kind of 
measure especially condemned by the laissez-faire 
school of economists, and its good results in this 



The Commonwealth 177 

case have always puzzled them; while, on the 
other hand, its success under one set of conditions 
has been often ignorantly held to justify its appli- 
cation under entirely different conditions. In 
other words, like the system of protective tariffs, 
it is one of those economic measures which may 
or may not be useful to a country, according to 
changes in time and circumstances. In the Crom- 
wellian period it benefited the English as much as 
it hurt the Dutch, and laid the foundation of Eng- 
lish commercial supremacy. Another cause of 
war was the insistence by the English upon their 
right to have their flag saluted by the Dutch as 
well as by other foreign powers. 

There followed a bloody and obstinate struggle 
for the mastery of the seas. Battle after battle 
was fought between the Dutch and English fleets. 
The latter were commanded by Blake, Monk, 
Dean, and other officers, who had won distinction 
ashore — for the process of differentiation between 
military service on land and on the sea was far 
from complete. The fighting was most deter- 
mined, and the Dutch won two or three victories ; 
but they were defeated again and again, until 
finally beaten into submission. The war was one 
undertaken purely from motives of commercial 
greed, against the nation which, among all the 
nations of continental Europe, stood closest to 
England in religious belief, in form of government, 
12 



178 Oliver Cromwell 

in social ideas, and in its system of political 
liberty. Cromwell hated the thought of the two 
free Protestant powers battling one another to 
exhaustion, while every ecclesiastical and political 
tyranny looked on with a grin of approbation. He 
wished the alliance, not the enmity, of Holland ; 
and though, when the war was once on, he and 
those he represented refused in any way to em- 
barrass their own government, yet they were 
anxious for peace. The Parliament, on the other 
hand, hailed the rise of the navy under Blake as 
a counterpoise to the power of the army under 
Cromwell. One effect of this Dutch war was to 
postpone the question of the dissolution of Parlia- 
ment ; another, to cause increased taxation, which 
was met by levying on the estates of the Royalist 
delinquents, so-called. 

By March, 1653, the Dutch were evidently 
beaten, and peace was in sight ; but before peace 
came, there was an end of the Rump Parliament. 
The discontent in the army had steadily in- 
creased. They wished a thorough reform in 
governmental methods; and with the character- 
istic Puritan habit of thought, wished especially 
to guarantee the safety of the "Godly interests" 
by a complete new election. On the other hand, 
the Parliament was scheming how to yield in 
name only, and not in fact, and had hit on the 
device of passing a bill which should continue 



The Commonwealth 179 

all the members of the existing Parliament without 
reelection ; and, moreover, should constitute them 
a general committee, with full power to pass upon 
the qualifications of any new members elected. 
This, of course, amounted to nothing, and the 
army would not accept it. 

Many conferences of the leaders of the two 
sides were held at Cromwell's house, the last on 
the evening of April 19, 1653, young Sir Harry 
Vane, formerly one of Cromwell's close friends, 
being among the number of the Parliament- 
ary leaders. Cromwell, on behalf of his party, 
warned them that their bill could not be 
accepted or submitted to, and the Parliamentary 
leaders finally agreed that it should not be 
brought up again in the House, until after further 
conference. But they either did not or could not 
keep their agreement. The members of the 
House were obstinately resolved to keep their 
places — many of them from corrupt motives, for 
they had undoubtedly made much money out of 
their positions, through the taxing of delinquents 
and otherwise. In short, they wished to per- 
petuate their government, to have England ruled 
by a little self-perpetuating oligarchy. Next 
morning, April 20, Parliament met and the leaders 
began to hurry the bill through the House. 

They reckoned without their host. Cromwell, 
sitting in his reception-room, and waiting the 



i8o Oliver Cromwell 

return of the conferees of last evening, learned 
what was going on, and just as he was clad, "in 
plain black clothes and gray worsted stockings," 
followed by a few officers and twenty or thirty 
stark musketeers, he walked down to the House. 
There he sat and listened for some time to the 
debate on the bill, once beckoning over Harri- 
son, the Republican general, his devoted follower. 
When the question was put as to whether the 
bill should pass, he rose and broke in with one 
of his characteristic speeches. First, he enumer- 
ated the good that had been done by Parliament, 
and then began to tell them of their injustice, 
their heed to their own self-interests, their delay 
to do right. One among his eager listeners 
called him to order, but no appeal to Parlia- 
mentary forms could save the doomed House. 
"Come, come!" answered Oliver, "we have had 
enough of this ; I will put an end to your prating ! " 
With that he clapped on his hat, stamped on the 
floor with his feet, and began to rate the Commons 
as if they were disobedient school-boys. "It is 
not fit that you should sit here any longer; you 
have sat too long for any good that you have 
been doing lately; you shall now give place to 
better men!" And Harrison called in the mus- 
keteers. Oliver then continued, enumerating the 
sins of the members, some of whom were drunk- 
ards, some lewd livers, some corrupt and unjust. 



The Commonwealth 181 

The House was on its feet as he lifted the mace, 
saying: "What shall we do with this bauble? 
Take it away!" and gave it to a musketeer; and 
then, turning toward the Speaker: "Fetch him 
down!" and fetched down he was. Gloomily 
the members went out, while Cromwell taunted 
Sir Harry Vane with breaking his promise, ending 
with : " The Lord deliver me from thee, Sir Harry 
Vane!" So ended the Long Parliament and, 
asserted Oliver, "We did not hear a dog bark at 
their going." 

Tomes have been written to prove whether 
Oliver was right or wrong in what he did at this 
time ; but the Rump Parliament had no claim to 
be, either in law or fact, the representative of the 
English people, or of any part of them that really 
counted. There was no justification for its con- 
tinuance, and no good whatever could come from 
permitting it to exist longer. Its actions, and 
especially its obstinate determination to perpetu- 
ate its own rule, without warrant in law, without 
the even higher and more perilous warrant of 
justice and national need, rendered it necessary 
that it should be dissolved. At the time Crom- 
well, without doubt, intended that it should be 
replaced by a genuinely representative body ; and 
if he had possessed the temper, the self-control, 
the far-sighted patriotism, and the personal dis- 
interestedness which would have enabled him to 



i8a Oliver Cromwell 

carry out his intentions in good faith, without 
thinking of his own interests, he would have 
rendered an inestimable public service and might 
have advanced by generations the movement for 
English liberty. 

In other words, if Cromwell had been a Wash- 
ington, the Puritan Revolution might have been 
made permanent. His early acts, after the disso- 
lution of the Long Parliament, showed a sincere 
desire on his part, and on the part of those whose 
leader he was, to provide some form of govern- 
ment which should secure justice and order, with- 
out leaving everything to the will of one man. 
His first effort was to summon an assembly of the 
Puritan notables. In the interim he appointed a 
new Council of State, with himself, as Captain- 
General, at its head. The fleet, the army, and 
the Independents generally, all hastened to pledge 
him their support, and England undoubtedly ac- 
quiesced in his action, being chiefly anxious to 
see whether or not the new Assembly could for- 
mulate a permanent scheme of government. If 
the Assembly and Cromwell together could have 
done this — that is, could have done work like that 
of the great Convention which promulgated the 
Constitution of the United States — all would have 
gone well. 

In criticizing Cromwell, however, we must 
remember that generally in such cases an even 



The Commonwealth 183 

greater share of blame must attach to the nation 
than to the man. Free government is only for 
nations that deserve it ; and they lose all right to 
it by licentiousness, no less than by servility. If 
a nation cannot govern itself, it makes compara- 
tively little difference whether its inability springs 
from a slavish and craven distrust of its own 
powers, or from sheer incapacity on the part of its 
citizens to exercise self-control and to act together. 
Self-governing freemen must have the power to 
accept necessary compromises, to make necessary 
concessions, each sacrificing somewhat of preju- 
dice, and even of principle, and every group must 
show the necessary subordination of its particular 
interests to the interests of the community as a 
whole. When the people will not or cannot work 
together ; when they permit groups of extremists 
to decline to accept anything that does not coin- 
cide with their own extreme views ; or when they 
let power slip from their hands through sheer 
supine indifference; then they have themselves 
chiefly to blame if the power is grasped by stronger 
hands. Yet, while keeping all this in mind, it 
must not be forgotten that a great and patriotic 
leader may, if the people have any capacity for 
self-government whatever, help them upward 
along their hard path by his wise leadership, his 
wise yielding to even what he does not like, and 
his wise refusal to consider his own selfish interests. 



184 Oliver Cromwell 

A people thoroughly unfit for self-government, as 
were the French at the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, are the natural prey of a conscienceless 
tyrant like Napoleon. A people like the Ameri- 
cans of the same generation can be led along the 
path of liberty and order by a Washington. The 
English people, in the middle of the seventeenth 
century, might have been helped to entire self- 
government by Cromwell, but were not suffi- 
ciently advanced politically to keep him from 
making himself their absolute master if he proved 
morally unequal to rising to the Washington level ; 
though doubtless they would not have tolerated 
a man of the Napoleonic type. 

The Assembly gathered in July, 1653. It was 
called the "Barebones" Parliament in derision, 
because one of its members — a Puritan leather- 
merchant — was named "Praise-God Barbon." 
The members were men of high character, of 
intense religious fervor, and, for the most part, of 
good social standing. They were actuated by 
sincere conviction, but they had no political train- 
ing whatever. They were not accustomed to 
make government move; they were theorists, 
rather than doers. Religious fervor, or mere 
fervor for excellence in the abstract, is a great 
mainspring for good work in politics as in war, 
but it is no substitute for training, in either civil 
or military life ; and if not accompanied by sound 



The Commonwealth 185 

common sense and a spirit of broad tolerance, it 
may do as much damage as any other mighty force 
which is unregulated. 

On July 4, Cromwell opened the Assembly 
with a long speech, which, toward the end, 
became a true Puritan sermon; a speech which 
had in it a very high note of religion and morality, 
but which showed a growing tendency in Oliver's 
mind to appeal from the judgment of men to 
what he esteemed the judgment of Heaven, 
whenever he thought men were wrong. Now, it 
is very essential that a man should have in him 
the capacity to defy his fellows if he thinks that 
they are doing the work of the devil, and not the 
work of the Lord; but it is even more essential 
for him to remember that he must be most cau- 
tious about mistaking his own views for those of 
the Lord; and also to remember that as the 
Lord's work is accomplished through human 
instruments, and as these can only be used to 
advantage by remembering that they are human, 
and, therefore, imperfect, in the long run a man 
can do nothing of permanence, save by joining 
his zeal to sound judgment, moderation, and the 
desire to accomplish practical results. 

The Assembly of Puritan notables was no 
more competent to initiate successful self-govern- 
ment in England than a Congress of Abolitionists, 
in i860, would have been competent to govern 



186 Oliver Cromwell 

the United States. They did not lack in lofty 
devotion to their ideals, but their methods were 
impractical. Cromwell professed to have resigned 
his power into their hands, and they went at their 
work in a spirit of high religious enthusiasm. The 
" instrument," under which they were summoned, 
had provided that their authority should be trans- 
ferred to another assembly elected under their 
directions; in other words, they were to form a 
constitutional convention. They undertook a 
host of reforms, largely in the right direction. 
Among other things, they proposed the abolition 
of the Court of Chancery, the establishment of 
civil marriage, the abolition of tithes, and of lay 
patronage. The clergy and the lawyers were cast 
into a frenzy of alarm over these proposals, and 
the landed proprietors became very uneasy lest 
some of their own unjust vested interests should 
suffer. 

Now, all this was most excellent in point of 
moral purpose, just as it would have been abso- 
lutely right, from the abstract ethical standpoint, 
if the Constitution of 1789, or the Republican 
Convention of i860, had declared for the aboli- 
tion of slavery in all the States. Of course, if the 
Constitution had made such a declaration, it 
would never have been adopted, and the English- 
speaking people of North America would have 
plunged into a condition of anarchy like that of 



The Commonwealth 187 

the aftertime South American Republics; while, 
if the Republican platform of i860 had taken 
such a position, Lincoln would not have been 
elected, no war for the Union would have been 
waged, and instead of slavery being abolished, it 
would have been perpetuated in at least one of 
the confederacies into which the country would 
have been split. The Barebones Parliament was 
too far ahead of the times, too indifferent to re- 
sults, and too impatient of the limitations and 
prejudices of its neighbors. Its members were 
reformers, who lost sight of the fact that a reform 
must be practicable in order to make it of value. 
They excited the utmost suspicion in the com- 
munity at large, and Cromwell, whose mind was 
in many respects very conservative, and who was 
an administrator rather than a constructive states- 
man, shared the general uneasiness. He shrank 
from the acts of the Barebones Parliament just as 
he had shrunk from the leveling tendencies of 
the Republicans. The leaders of both had gone 
too far in the direction of speculative reform. 
Cromwell erred on the other side, and did not go 
far enough. It is just as necessary for the practi- 
cal man to remember that his practical qualities 
are useless, or worse than useless, unless he joins 
with them that spirit of striving after better things 
which marks the reformer, as it is for this same 
reformer to remember that he cannot give effective 



188 Oliver Cromwell 

expression to his desire for a higher life save by 
following rigidly practical ways. 

Cromwell, in his opening address to the Con- 
vention, had been carried away by his religious 
enthusiasm, and in a burst of strange, rugged elo- 
quence had bid his hearers remember that they , 
must "hold themselves accountable to God 
only;" must own their call to be from Him, and 
must strive to bring about God's rule upon earth. 
When they took his words literally he became 
heartily uneasy, as did the great bulk of English- 
men ; for, of course, there were limitless interpre- 
tations to be put as to the proper way of being 
"owned" by God, and Oliver was not in the least 
inclined to accept the interpretation adopted by 
the Barebones Parliament. He wished adminis- 
trative reform in Church and State, but he had 
little sympathy with what he deemed revolution- 
ary theories, whether good or bad. 

The Convention gradually grew conscious that 
it had no support in popular sympathy, and dis- 
solved of its own motion, after having named a 
Council of State, which drew up a remarkable 
constitution under the name of the "Instrument 
of Government." This instrument was adopted 
by Cromwell and the Council of Officers, and 
under it a new Parliament was convened. Even 
yet, Cromwell, and at least the majority of the 
army, shrank from abandoning every effort at 



The Commonwealth 189 

constitutional rule in favor of the naked power of 
the sword. Nevertheless, Cromwell had even less 
fondness for the rule of a Parliament elected 
under any conditions he was able to devise. He 
realized that the majority of the nation was against 
him, and dreaded lest it might take steps toward 
the rehabilitation of the monarchy. In his ad- 
dress to the Barebones Convention he had dwelt 
with special emphasis upon the fact that a Par- 
liament elected merely by the majority might not 
be nearly so suitable for doing the Lord's work as 
such an assembly as that he had convened. 

In short, all his qualities, both good and bad, 
tended to render the forms and the narrowly lim- 
ited powers of constitutional government irksome 
to him. His strength, his intensity of conviction, 
his delight in exercising powers for what he con- 
ceived to be good ends ; his dislike of speculative 
reforms and his inability to appreciate the neces- 
sity of theories to a practical man who wishes to 
do good work; his hatred of both King and 
oligarchy, while he utterly distrusted a popular 
majority ; his tendency to insist upon the superi- 
ority of the moral law, as he saw it, to the laws of 
mankind round about him — all these tendencies 
worked together to unfit him for the task of help- 
ing a liberty-loving people on the road toward 
freedom. 

The Instrument of Government was a very 



190 Oliver Cromwell 

remarkable document. It was a written consti- 
tution. Cromwell and his soldiers desired, like 
Washington and his fellow-members of the Con- 
stitutional Convention which framed the govern- 
ment of the United States, to have the funda- 
mental law of the land put in shape where it 
would be accessible to all men, and where its 
terms would not be open to doubt. Such a 
course was absolutely necessary if a free govern- 
ment, in the modern sense, was to be established 
on radically new lines. It has not been ren- 
dered necessary in the free England of to-day, 
because, very fortunately, England has been able 
to reach her freedom by evolution, not revolution. 
The Instrument of Government confided the 
executive power to a Lord Protector and Coun- 
cil; Cromwell was named as the first Protector. 
The legislative power was assigned without restric- 
tion to a Parliament elected by constituencies 
formed on a new and equitable franchise, there 
being a sweeping redistribution of seats. Parlia- 
ment could pass a bill over the Protector's veto, 
and was to meet once in three years, for at least 
five months; but it had little control over the 
executive, save that with it rested the initiative in 
filling vacancies in the Council. The Protector 
was allotted a certain fixed sum, which made him 
largely independent of the Parliament's action. 
Nevertheless, the Protector was under real con- 



The Commonwealth 191 

stitutional control. Religious liberty was secured 
for all congregations which did not admit "papacy 
or prelacy," the Episcopalians and Roman Cath- 
olics being excluded from this right just as they 
were excluded from the right of voting, rather as 
enemies to the Commonwealth than because of 
their mere religious beliefs. They were regarded 
as what would now be called, in the political termi- 
nology of continental Europe, " irreconcilables ; " 
and the mass and the Prayer-Book were both pro- 
hibited. Until the first Parliament met, which was 
to be on the anniversary of the battle of Dunbar, 
on September 3, 1654, the Protector and Council 
were to issue ordinances with the force of law. 

The Constitution thus had very many points of 
difference from that under which the United 
States grew into a great nation. Yet it ranks 
with it, rather than with the system of Parliamen- 
tary supremacy which was ultimately adopted in 
England. It was, of course, less popular, in the 
true sense, than the government of either the 
United States or Great Britain at the present 
moment. Oliver, later on, insisted on what he 
called the " Four Fundamentals," which answered 
to what we now style Constitutional Rights. His 
position was strictly in accord with the American, 
as opposed to the English, theory of embodying, 
by preference in some written document, proposi- 
tions which neither the law-making body nor the 



192 Oliver Cromwell 

executive could modify. It was not to be ex- 
pected that he should hit on the device of a 
Supreme Court to keep guard over these propo- 
sitions. 

On December 16, 1653, Oliver was installed 
at Westminster, as Lord Protector. The judges, 
the army, the fleet, the mass of Independents, and 
the bulk of well-to-do citizens, concurred in the 
new departure ; for the Protectorship gave stability 
and the election of the new Parliament the assu- 
rance of liberty. There were plenty of opponents, 
however. The Royalists were implacable. The 
exiled House of Stuart, with a baseness of which 
their great opponent was entirely incapable, sought 
to compass his assassination. They could in no 
other way hope to reach the man whom they 
dared not look in the face on the field of battle. 
Plot after plot was formed to kill the Protector, 
but the plotters were invariably discovered and 
brought to justice; while every attempt at open 
insurrection was stamped out with the utmost 
ease. To the Royalist malcontents were added 
the extreme fanatics, the ultra-reformers of every 
type — religious, political, and social. These were, 
at the time, more dangerous than the Royalists, 
for they numbered supporters in the army, includ- 
ing some who had been prominent friends of 
Cromwell up to this time, like General Harrison. 
It was necessary, therefore, to arrest some of 



. , tf 




The Commonwealth 193 

the most turbulent agitators, including preachers, 
and to deprive certain officers of their commis- 
sions. 

The Protector and his Council acted wisely 
in their ordinances, redressing in practical shape 
many grievances. The Barebones Parliament had 
striven to abolish the Court of Chancery outright, 
and to hand its power over to the judges of the 
Common Law, which would merely have aggra- 
vated the existing hardships by checking the 
growth of the principle of equity. Oliver acted 
more conservatively : in fact, altogether too con- 
servatively; but still he did something. In the 
Church government, also, a good deal was accom- 
plished by the appointment of commissioners of 
good character to supervise the ministers, while 
allowing each to organize his congregation on any 
lines he chose — Presbyterian, Congregationalist, or 
Baptist. Dissenters were permitted to form sepa- 
rate congregations — "gathered churches" in the 
phrase of the day — if they so desired. Of course, 
this was not by any means complete religious 
toleration, but it was a nearer approach to it than 
any government in Europe, with the possible ex- 
ception of the Dutch, had yet sanctioned, and it 
was so far in advance of the general spirit of the 
time that the new Parliament — a really represen- 
tative body — took sharp exception to it. In 
point of religious toleration Oliver went just as 
13 



i94 Oliver Cromwell 

far as the people of his day would let him — farther 
than any other ruler of the century was willing to 
go, save only Henry IV. of France — and Henry IV. 
really believed in nothing, and so could easily be 
tolerant, while Cromwell's zealous faith was part 
of the very marrow of his being. 

Cromwell also concluded peace with the Dutch. 
Before the Long Parliament was dissolved it had 
become evident that the navy would ultimately 
conquer this peace for England ; but the stubborn 
Dutch had to undergo several additional defeats 
before they would come to terms. Blake, the 
great admiral, had no particular admiration for 
Cromwell, but finally threw in his lot with him 
on the ground that the fleet had no concern with 
politics, and should limit itself strictly to the effort 
"to keep foreigners from fooling us." Monk was 
the admiral most in view in the later stages of the 
Dutch war. When it was over, he was sent 
back to keep the Highlands in order, which he and 
his fellow-Cromwellians did, with a thoroughness 
not afterward approached for a century. Scot- 
land was now definitely united to England. 

The new Parliament consisted of four hundred 
members from England, thirty from Scotland, and 
thirty from Ireland. They were elected by a gen- 
eral suffrage, based on the possession of property 
to the value of £200. The Parliament thus gath- 
ered was representative in a very wide sense. 



The Commonwealth 195 

Nearly two hundred years were to elapse before 
any other as truly representative was to sit in Eng- 
land. The classes whose inclusion would certainly 
have made trouble were excluded ; and, while the 
suffrage had been extended, and gross inequalities 
of representation abolished, there had been no 
such revolutionary action as suddenly to introduce 
masses of men unaccustomed to the exercise of self- 
government. Indeed, the House had arbitrarily 
erased from its roll of membership the names of a 
few ultra-Republicans. It was chiefly Cromwell's 
own fault that he failed to get along with this Par- 
liament, and, therefore, failed to put the govern- 
ment on a permanent basis of orderly liberty. 

At the beginning, everything seemed to go well. 
He opened the Parliament with one of those note- 
worthy speeches of which some seventeen have 
been preserved ; speeches in the proper sense, un- 
questionably better when spoken to listeners than 
when read by critics, but instinct with the rough 
power of the speaker, permeated with religious 
fervor and sincere striving after the right; and 
even where the reasoning is most wrong-headed, 
containing phrases and sentiments which show the 
keenest insight into the needs of the moment, and 
the needs of eternity as well. The sentences are 
often very involved, it being quite evident that 
the speeches were not written out, not even delib- 
erately thought out, in advance ; for Oliver, even 



196 Oliver Cromwell 

as he spoke, kept dropping and rejecting such of 
his half -finished utterances as did not give suffi- 
ciently accurate or vehement expression to his 
thought. Yet they contain abundance of the 
loftiest thought, expressed in language which 
merely gains strength from its rude, vigorous 
homeliness. For generations after Cromwell's 
death, the polished cynics and dull pedants, who 
abhorred and misunderstood him, spoke of his 
utterances with mixed ridicule and wrath : Hume 
hazarding the opinion that if his speeches, letters, 
and writings, were gathered together they would 
form "one of the most nonsensical collections the 
world had ever seen." We could far better afford 
to lose every line Hume ever wrote than the 
speeches of Cromwell. 

In his opening address he pointed out that what 
the nation most needed was healing and settling; 
and in a spirit of thoroughly English conservatism, 
denounced any merely revolutionary doctrines 
which would do away with the security of property 
or would give the tenant " as liberal a fortune" as 
the landlord. In religious matters also, he con- 
demned those who could do nothing but cry: 
"Overturn! Overturn!! Overturn !!! "and together 
with his praise of what had been done, and of the 
body to which he spoke, he mingled much advice, 
remarking: "I hope you will not be un willing to 
hear a little again of the sharp as well as of the 



The Commonwealth 197 

sweet." He exhorted them to go to work in sober 
earnest ; to remedy in practical shape any wrongs, 
and to join with him in working for good govern- 
ment. Unfortunately, he made the mental reser- 
vation that he should be himself the ultimate judge 
of what good government was. 

Equally unfortunately, there was in the House 
a body of vehement Republicans who at once 
denied the legal existence of either Council or Pro- 
tector, on the ground that the Long Parliament 
had never been dissolved. Of course such an 
argument was self -destructive, as it told equally 
against the legality of the new Parliament in which 
they sat. Parliament contented itself with recog- 
nizing the Instrument of Government as only of 
provisional validity, and proceeded to discuss it, 
clause by clause, as the groundwork of a new Con- 
stitution. It was unanimously agreed that Crom- 
well should retain his power for five years, but Par- 
liament showed by its actions that it did not intend 
to leave him in a position of absolute supremacy. 
Instantly Oliver interfered, as arbitrarily as any 
hereditary king might have done. 

He first appeared before the Parliament, and 
in an exceedingly able speech announced his will- 
ingness to accept a Parliamentary constitution, 
provided that it contained four fundamentals not 
to be overturned by law. The fundamentals were, 
first, that the country was to be governed by a 



198 Oliver Cromwell 

single person, by a single executive, and a Parlia- 
ment ; second, that Parliaments were not to make 
themselves perpetual; third, that liberty of con- 
science should be respected ; fourth, that the Pro- 
tector and Parliament should have joint power 
over the militia. 

All four propositions were sound. The first 
two were agreed to at once, and the third also, 
though with some reluctance, the Parliament 
being less liberal than the Protector in religious 
matters. Over the control of the soldiers there 
was irreconcilable difference. 

Cromwell was not content with arguments. He 
would not permit any member to enter the House 
without signing an engagement not to alter the 
government as it had been settled ; that is, every 
member had to subscribe to the joint government 
of the Protector and the Parliament. A hundred 
members refused to sign. Three-fourths of the 
House did sign, and went on with their work. 

Until the assembling of this Parliament, every 
step that Oliver had taken could be thoroughly 
justified. He had not played the part of a 
usurper. He had been a zealous patriot, work- 
ing in the interests of the people; and he had 
only broken up the Long Parliament when the 
Long Parliament had itself become an utterly 
unrepresentative body. He had then shown his 
good faith by promptly summoning a genuinely 



The Commonwealth 199 

representative body. It is possible to defend 
him even for excluding the hundred members 
who declined to subscribe to his theory of the 
fundamentals of government. But it is not pos- 
sible to excuse him for what he now did. Par- 
liament, as it was left after the extremists had 
been expelled, stood as the only elective body 
which it was possible to gather in England that 
could in any sense be called representative, and 
yet agree to work with Cromwell. Had Crom- . 
well not become cursed with the love of power; 
had he not acquired a dictatorial habit of mind, 
and the fatal incapacity to acknowledge that 1 
there might be righteousness in other methods 
than his own, he could certainly have avoided a 
break with this Parliament. His splitting with 
it was absolutely needless. It agreed to confirm 
his powers for five years, and, as it happened, at 
the end of that time he was dead. Even had he 
lived there could be no possible excuse for refusing 
such a lease of power, on the ground that it was 
too short ; for it was amply long enough to allow 
him to settle whatever was necessary to settle. 

Cromwell, and later his apologists, insisted that, 
by delay and by refusing to grant supplies until 
their grievances were considered, the Parliament 
was encouraging the spirit of revolt. In reality 
the spirit of revolt was tenfold increased, not by 
the Parliament's action, but by Cromwell's, in 



200 Oliver Cromwell 

seizing arbitrary power. If he had shown a 
tenth of the forbearance that Washington 
showed in dealing with the various Continental 
Congresses, he would have been readily granted 
far more power than ever Washington was 
given. He could easily have settled affairs on a 
constitutional basis, which would have given him 
all the power he had any right to ask ; for his 
difficulties in this particular crisis were nothing 
like so great as those which Washington sur- 
mounted. The plea that the safety of the people 
and of the cause of righteousness depended upon 
his unchecked control, is a plea always made in 
such cases, and generally, as in this particular 
case, without any basis in fact. The need was 
just the other way. 

Contrast Cromwell's conduct with that of Lin- 
coln, just before his second election as President. 
There was a time in the summer of 1864 when it 
looked as if the Democrats would win, and elect 
McClellan. At that time it was infinitely more 
essential to the salvation of the Union that Lin- 
coln should be continued in power, than it was to 
the salvation of the Commonwealth, in 1654, that 
Cromwell should be continued in power. Lin- 
coln would have been far more excusable than 
Cromwell if he had insisted upon keeping control. 
Yet such a thought never entered Lincoln's head. 
He prepared to abide in good faith the decision of 



The Commonwealth 201 

the people, and one of the most touching incidents 
of his life is the quiet and noble sincerity with 
which he made preparations, if McClellan was 
elected, to advise with him and help him in every 
way, and to use his own power, during the interval 
between McClellan's election and inauguration, 
in such a manner as would redound most to the 
advantage of the latter, and would increase, as far 
as possible, the chance for the preservation of the 
Union. It was at this time of Cromwell's life that, 
at the parting of the ways, he chose the wrong 
way. Great man though he was, and far though 
the good that he did outbalanced the evil, yet he 
lost the right to stand with men like Washington 
and Lincoln of modern times, and with the very, 
very few who, like Timoleon, in some measure 
approached their standard in ancient times. 

As the Parliament continued in session, the atti- 
tude of the Protector changed from sullen to fierce 
hostility. It was entitled to sit five months. By 
a quibble he construed this to mean five lunar 
months. On January 22, 1655, he dissolved it, 
after rating it in a long and angry speech. With 
its dissolution it became evident to the great mass 
of true liberty-lovers that all hope of real freedom 
was at an end, and the forces that told for the 
restoration of the King were increased tenfold in 
strength. Nevertheless, some of the purest and 
most ardent lovers of liberty, like Milton, still 



202 Oliver Cromwell 

clung despairingly to the Protector. They recog- 
nized that, with all his faults, and in spite of his 
determination to rule in arbitrary fashion, he yet 
intended to secure peace, justice, and good govern- 
ment, and, alike in power and in moral grandeur, 
towered above his only possible alternative, 
Charles II., as a giant towers above a pigmy. 



CHAPTER VI. 

PERSONAL RULE. 

WHEN Cromwell, in January, 1655, dis- 
missed the first Protectorate Parliament, 
he left himself nothing to do but to estab- 
lish his own personal rule; in other words, he 
became a tyrant. Of course the word cannot be 
used in the sense we use it in describing Ivan the 
Terrible, or Agathokles. As each country must, 
sooner or later, obtain exactly that measure of 
political freedom to which it is entitled, so, when 
it falls under a tyranny, the tyranny must be 
strictly conditioned by the character of the people. 
Cromwell ruled over Englishmen, not Russians or 
Greeks, and no Englishman would have tolerated 
for twenty-four hours what was groaningly borne 
by Muscovites, who had lost every vestige of man- 
hood beneath the Tartar yoke, or by Syracusans, 
in the days of the rapid decadence of the Hel- 
lenistic world. Cromwell's government was a 
tyranny because it was based on his own personal 
rule, his personal decision as to what taxes should 
be levied, what ordinances issued, what police 
measures decreed and carried out, what foreign 
policy adopted or rejected. He was influenced 
very much by public opinion, when public opinion 

203 



204 Oliver Cromwell 

found definite expression in the action of a body 
of legislators or of an assembly of officers; but 
even in such cases he was only influenced, not con- 
trolled. In other words, he had gone back to the 
theory of government professed by the man he had 
executed, and by that man's predecessors. There 
was, however, the tremendous and far-reaching 
difference, that, whereas the Stuart kings clung 
to absolute power for the sake of rewarding favor- 
ites and of carrying out policies that were hostile 
to the honor and interest of England, Cromwell 
seized it with the sincere purpose of exalting the 
moral law at home and increasing the honor of 
England's name abroad. Moreover, he was in 
fact what no Stuart was, in anything but name: 
a "king among men," and his mighty strength 
enabled him, at least partially, to realize his pur- 
pose. 

Cromwell doubtless persuaded himself that he 
was endeavoring to secure what would now be 
called a constitutional government: one which, 
in his own words, "should avoid alike the ex- 
tremes of monarchy and democracy." He was 
desirous of paying heed to the wishes of those 
whom he esteemed the wisest and most honest 
among the people. He had somewhat of that 
gift for personal popularity which was so marked 
a feature of Queen Elizabeth — seemingly the only 
sovereign whom he admired, among all his prede- 



Personal Rule 205 

cessors. To the last he kept stirring vaguely for 
a constitutional system ; and he sincerely disliked 
merely arbitrary rule. 

But by the time he became Lord Protector he 
was too impatient of difference of opinion, too 
doggedly convinced of his own righteousness and 
wisdom, to be really fit to carry on a free gov- 
ernment. He had sought to introduce the reign 
of the saints ; but when, in the Barebones Parlia- 
ment, he gathered together the very men whom 
he deemed their arch-representatives, it was only 
to find, as was of course inevitable, that he and 
they could not agree as to the method of realizing 
the reign of the saints in this very material world. 
Then he sought to secure a government by the 
representatives of the people : only to find that he 
got along even less well with them than with the 
saints. In short, while he had kept his nobility 
of purpose, his whole character had grown less and 
less such as to fit him to found a government of the 
kind toward which his race was dimly striving. 

He made varied experiments for the control of 
England. After the first Protectorate Parliament 
had been abolished, he established the govern- 
ment of the major-generals, or in other words, 
purely military rule; dividing England into a 
dozen districts, with a major-general over each as 
the ultimate authority. The prime function of 
the major-generals was to keep order, and they 



206 Oliver Cromwell 

crushed under their iron heels every spark of 
Royalist insurrection, or of Leveller and Anabap- 
tist uprising. They interfered in civil matters 
also, and were especially required to see to the 
rigid observance of the Sabbath, and to suppress 
all cock-fighting, horse-racing, and kindred sports, 
as well as to shut up doubtful ale-houses. There 
certainly never was a more extraordinary despot- 
ism than this; the despotism of a man who 
sought power, not to gratify himself, or those 
belonging to him, in any of the methods to which 
all other tyrants have been prone; but to estab- 
lish the reign of the Lord as he saw it. Here 
was a tyrant who used the overwhelming strength 
of his military force to forbid what he considered 
profane amusements, and to enforce on one day 
of the week a system of conduct which was old- 
Jewish in character. Of course the fact that he 
meant well, and that his motives were high, did 
not make it any the easier for the people with 
whose pleasures and prejudices he thus irritatingly 
interfered. 

The Puritan passion for regulating, not merely 
the religion, but the morals and manners of their 
neighbors, especially in the matter of Sunday ob- 
servance and of pastimes generally, was peculiarly 
exasperating to men of a more easy-going nature. 
Even nowadays, the effort for practical reform in 
American city government is rendered immeasura- 



Personal Rule 207 

bly more difficult by the fact that a considerable 
number of the best citizens are prone to devote 
their utmost energies, not to striving for the funda- 
mentals of social morality, civic honesty, and good 
government, but, in accordance with their own 
theory of propriety of conduct, to preventing 
other men from pursuing what these latter regard 
as innocent pleasures ; while, on the other hand, a 
large number of good citizens, in their irritation 
at any interference with what they feel to be 
legitimate pastimes, welcome the grossest corrup- 
tion and misrule rather than submit to what they 
call "Puritanism." When this happens, before 
our eyes, we need not wonder that in Cromwell's 
day the determination of the Puritans to put down 
ale-houses and prohibit every type of Sunday pas- 
time, irritated large bodies of the people to the 
point of longing for the restoration of the Stuarts, 
no matter what might be the accompanying evils 
of corruption and tyranny. 

The experiment of governing by the major- 
generals provoked such mutterings of discontent 
that it had to be abandoned. Another Parliament 
was summoned, and out of this Oliver arbitrarily 
kept any man whom he did not think ought to 
come in. It was anything but a radical body, 
and after declaring against the rule of the major- 
generals, it offered Oliver the kingship, an offer 
to which the army objected, and which Oliver, 



2o8 Oliver Cromwell 

therefore, refused ; but even with this subservient 
assembly Oliver could not get along, and it finally- 
shared the fate of its predecessor. The objection 
of the army to the kingship was partly due to the 
presence of so many Republican zealots in its 
ranks ; but probably the main reason for the objec- 
tion was that the army, more or less consciously, 
realized that its own overmastering importance in 
the Commonwealth would vanish as soon as the 
man it had made supreme by the sword was 
changed into a constitutional king. 

One by one almost all of Oliver's old comrades 
and adherents left him, and he was driven to put 
his own kinsfolk into as many of the higher places, 
both in the State and the army, as possible ; less 
from nepotism than from the need of having in 
important positions men who would do his will, 
without question. Eventually he had to abandon 
most of the ideas of political liberty which he had 
originally championed, and, following the path 
which the Long Parliament had already trod, 
he finally established a rigid censorship of the 
press. 

Yet, though it must be freely admitted that in 
its later years the government of Cromwell was 
in form and substance a tyranny, it must be no 
less freely acknowledged that he used with wisdom 
and grandeur the power he had usurped. The 
faults he committed were the faults of the age, 



Personal Rule 209 

rather than special to himself, while his sincerity 
and honesty were peculiarly his own. 

He fairly carried out his pledge of healing and 
settling, and he put through a long series of ad- 
ministrative reforms. In England and Wales his 
internal administration undoubtedly told for what 
was of moral and material advantage to the coun- 
try ; and if there was heavy taxation, at least it 
produced visible and tangible results, which was 
never the case under the Stuarts, before or after 
him. Yet his rule could not but produce discon- 
tent. In the first place, the Royalists were not 
well treated. In that age the beaten party was 
expected to pay heavily for its lack of success, 
both in purse and in body ; and it was not to be 
expected that the victorious Puritans should show 
toward their defeated foes the generosity displayed 
by Grant and his fellow-victors in the American 
Civil War. In the American Revolution, the 
Tories were at first followed with much the same 
vindictiveness that the Royalists were followed 
after King Charles had been brought to the block. 
But Washington and all the leading American 
statesmen disapproved of this, and after the first 
heat of passion was over the American Royalists 
were allowed precisely the same civil and political 
rights as their neighbors. On the contrary, in 
England, under the Commonwealth, the Royalists 
were kept disfranchised, and taxation was arranged 
14 



210 Oliver Cromwell 

so as always to fall with crushing weight upon 
them, thus insuring their permanent alienation. 
As regards the rest of the people, while there was 
considerable interference with political and relig- 
ious liberty, it was probably only what the times 
demanded, and was certainly much less than 
occurred in almost any other country. Episco- 
palians were denied the use of the Prayer-Book, 
and, like the Catholics, were given liberty of con- 
science only on condition that they should not 
practise their faith in public. Irritating though 
this was, and wrong though it was, it fell infinitely 
short of what had been done to Protestants, under 
Queen Mary, by the temporarily victorious Cath- 
olics, or to Puritans and Catholics under Queen 
Elizabeth, or of what was to be done to the Cov- 
enanters of Scotland, under the victorious Episco- 
palians ; but such considerations would not have 
altered the discontent, even had the discontented 
kept them in mind. When provocation is suf- 
ficient to drive a man into revolution, it matters 
little in practical politics how much beyond this 
point it is carried. The breaking-point is reached 
sooner in some nations than in others ; but in all 
strong nations persecution will cause revolt long 
before it takes the terrible form given it by Span- 
iards and Turks ; and, once the war is on, the men 
who revolt hate any persecutor so much that there 
is scant room for intensification of the feeling. 



Personal Rule 211 

Moreover, instead of the Cromwellian govern- 
ment growing more, it grew less tolerant of Cathol- 
icism and Episcopacy as time went on. 

The people at large were peculiarly irritated by 
what were merely the defects inevitably incident to 
the good features of Puritanism in that age. When 
faith is very strong and belief very sincere, men 
must possess great wisdom, broad charity, and 
the ability to learn by experience, or else they will 
certainly try to make others live up to their own 
standards. This would be bad enough, even were 
the standards absolutely right; and it is neces- 
sarily worse in practice than in theory, inasmuch 
as mixed with the right there is invariably an ele- 
ment of what is wrong or foolish. The extreme 
exponents and apologists of any fervent creed can 
always justify themselves, in the realm of pure 
logic, for insisting that all the world shall be made 
to accept and act up to their standards, and that 
they must necessarily strive to bring this about, 
if they really believe what they profess to believe. 
Of course, in practice, the answer is that there are 
hundreds of different creeds, or shades of creeds, 
all of which are believed in with equal devoutness 
by their followers, and therefore in a workaday 
government it is necessary to insist that none shall 
interfere with any other. Where people are as 
far advanced in practical good sense and in true 
religious toleration as in the United States to-day, 



212 Oliver Cromwell 

the great majority of each creed gradually grows 
to accept this position as axiomatic, and the 
smaller minority is kept in check without effort, 
both by law and by public opinion. 

In Cromwell's time, such law did not obtain in 
any land, and public opinion was not ripe for it. 
He was far in advance of his fellow-Englishmen. 
He described their attitude perfectly, and indeed 
the attitude of all Europe, when he remarked: 
" Every sect saith, Oh, give me liberty! but, given 
it and to spare, he will not yield it to anyone else. 
Liberty of conscience is a natural right, and he 
that would have it ought to give it. ... I desire 
it from my heart; I have prayed for it; I have 
watched for the day to see union and right under- 
standing between the Godly people — Scots, Eng- 
lish, Jews, Gentiles, Presbyterians, Independents, 
Anabaptists, and all." 

The whole principle of religious toleration is 
summed up in these brief sentences. In his 
higher and better moments, and far more than 
most men of his generation, Cromwell tried to 
live up to them. When Mazarin, the great 
French cardinal, in responding to Cromwell's call 
for toleration of the Vaudois, asked toleration for 
English Catholics, Cromwell answered, truly, that 
he had done all he could in face of the hostile 
spirit of the people, and more than had before 
been done in England. Of course the position of 



Personal Rule 213 

the English Catholics was beyond all comparison 
better than that of the Vaudois ; but in such a con- 
troversy the ugly fact was that neither side would 
grant to others what it demanded for itself. To 
the most persecuted of all peoples Cromwell did 
render a signal service. He connived at the set- 
tlement of Jews in London, after having in vain 
sought to bring about their open toleration. 

In Scotland, the rule of the Protector wrought 
unmixed good. There was no persecution and 
no interference with religious liberty, save in so 
far as the restraint of persecution and intolerance 
could itself be called such. Monk, and Dean, 
after him, as Cromwell's lieutenants, did excellent 
work, and even cautiously endeavored to mitigate 
the horrors of the persecutions for witchcraft — for 
these horrible manifestations of superstition were 
then in full force in Scotland, even more than in 
either old or New England. 

On the whole, then, England and Scotland 
fared well under Oliver Cromwell — "Old Noll," 
as he was affectionately called by his mainstay, 
the army. In Ireland, the case was different. 
Materially, even in Ireland, the conditions greatly 
improved during the Protectorate, because order 
was rigidly preserved and law enforced; and any 
system which secured order and law were bound 
to bring about a temporary bettering of condi- 
tions when contrasted with the frightful anarchy 



214 Oliver Cromwell 

which had preceded it. Anarchy always serves 
simply as the handmaiden of despotism, as those 
who bring it about should know. But the relig- 
ious element in the Irish problem rendered it in- 
soluble by the means then adopted for its solution. 
Cromwell was not responsible for introducing the 
methods known by his name. They were the 
methods then universally in use by the represen- 
tatives of every victorious nationality or religion, 
in dealing with a beaten foe. The only difference 
was that Cromwell's immense energy and power 
enabled him to apply them with dreadful effect- 
iveness. 

In England, Cromwell stood for religious tolera- 
tion, so far as he was able. Fanatics who thought 
themselves incarnations of the Saviour, or prophets 
of a new dispensation, or who indulged in indecent 
or seditious conduct, or who disturbed the public 
peace by breaking into regular churches, of course 
had to be suppressed. Nowadays, most offenders 
of this type would be ignored, and, if not, they 
would simply be arrested by the police, in the 
course of the ordinary exercise of the police power, 
just as any other disturbers of the peace are 
arrested. In those days, however, such offenders 
would have been punished with death in Spain, 
Italy, or Austria ; and, indeed, in most continental 
countries. In the England of Cromwell, they 
were merely temporarily imprisoned. The atti- 



Personal Rule 215 

tude of mind, both of the public generally and of 
the best and most religious people, toward Unita- 
rians, Socinians, and those who would nowadays 
be called Free-Thinkers, was purely medieval ; and 
even Cromwell could only moderate the persecu- 
tion to which they were subjected. But these 
were minor exceptions. For the majority of the 
people in England, there was religious liberty ; and 
for the bulk of the minority, though there was not 
complete religious liberty, there was a nearer ap- 
proach to it than obtained in continental Europe. 
In Ireland, on the other hand, the public exer- 
cise of the faith of the enormous majority was 
prohibited, and their religious teachers expelled. 
There is a popular belief that under Cromwell all 
Irishmen were expelled from three-fourths of the 
island, and driven into Connaught, their places 
being taken by English and Scotch immigrants. 
While exceedingly cruel, this would have been 
an understandable policy, and would have resulted 
in the substitution of one race and one creed for 
another race and another creed throughout the 
major part of the island. What was actually 
done, however, combined cruelty with ultimate 
inefficiency; it caused great immediate suffering, 
while perpetuating exactly the conditions against 
which it was supposed to provide. The Catholic 
landholders were, speaking generally, driven into 
Connaught, and the priests expelled, while the 



216 Oliver Cromwell 

peasants, laborers, and artisans were left as they 
were, but of course deprived of all the leadership 
which could give them a lift upward. In Ulster 
there had been a considerable substitution of one 
race for the other, among the actual tillers and 
occupiers of the soil. Under Cromwell, the change 
elsewhere consisted in the bringing in of alien 
landlords. In other words, to the already existing 
antagonism of race, creed, and speech, was added 
the antagonism of caste. The property-holder, 
the landlord, the man of means, was an English- 
man by race and speech, and a Protestant by faith ; 
while the mass of the laborers round about him 
were Catholic Celts who spoke Erse. Ultra 
admirers of Cromwell and the Puritans have 
actually spoken as if this plan, provided only that 
it had been allowed to work long enough, would 
have produced a Puritan Ireland. There was 
never the remotest chance of its producing such 
an effect. The mass of the Irish, when all their 
native teachers were removed, did gradually tend 
to adopt English as their tongue, but their devo- 
tion to their own faith, and their hatred of English 
rule, were merely intensified ; while the course of 
the governing race was such as absolutely to in- 
sure the land troubles which have riven Ireland 
up to the present day. The very unedifying 
intolerance of the Protestant sects toward one 
another was manifested as strongly in Cromwell's 



Personal Rule 217 

time as later. It must be said for him that he did 
not, like his successors for generations, shape Eng- 
lish policy toward Ireland on the lines of Spain's 
policy toward her own colonies, and oppress the 
Protestant descendants of the English in Ireland 
only less than the native Irish themselves; but 
the great central fact remains that this Irish policy 
was one of bitter oppression, and that the abhor- 
rence with which the Irish, to this day, speak of 
"the curse o' Crummle," is historically justifiable. 
It is a relief to turn from the Cromwellian policy 
in Ireland to the Cromwellian policy in foreign 
affairs. England never stood higher in her rela- 
tions with the outside world than she stood under 
Cromwell; a height all the more noteworthy be- 
cause it lay between the two abysses marked by 
the policy of the earlier and the later Stuart kings. 
The French biographer of the great Turenne, du 
Buisson, Major of the Regiment de Verdelin, 
writing in the days of Charles II., when England 
was despised rather than hated on the Continent, 
spoke with a mixture of horror and fear of Crom- 
well, as the man who "apres V attentat le plus enorme 
dont on a jamais out parler, avoit trouve' le secret de se 
faire craindre, non seulement des Anglois, mats en- 
core des Princes voisins." This was written as 
expressing the attitude of the power with which 
he was in alliance, and from it may be gathered 
how those felt who were opposed to him. 



218 Oliver Cromwell 

Cromwell's strong religious feelings and mili- 
tary instincts, alike bade him meddle in the policy 
of the Continent. The era of the great religious 
wars was closed. More than a century was to 
pass before the era of religious persecution was to 
cease, but the time had gone by when one Chris- 
tian country would try, by force of arms, to con- 
quer another for the purpose of stamping out its 
religious belief. Cromwell, however, did not see 
this, and he naturally chose as his special oppo- 
nent the power which itself was equally blind to 
the fact — that is, Spain. Beyond a question, he 
was influenced partly by the commercial and 
material interests of England in the policy he 
pursued, but the religious motive was uppermost 
in his own mind, and he never could get over the 
feeling that it ought to be uppermost in the 
minds of everyone else. The very able Swedish 
king, Charles X., was then pursuing the fatal 
policy of the Swedish kings of that century, and 
was endeavoring to conquer territory at the ex- 
pense of the Danes and North Germans, instead 
of establishing, to the east and southeast of the 
Baltic, a dominion which could hold its own 
against Russia. Cromwell selected the Swede as 
the natural enemy of Antichrist, and wished to 
back him in a general religious war. He was 
amusingly irritated with the English, because they 
would not feel as he did, and even more with the 



Personal Rule 219 

Dutch, Danes, and Brandenburgers for declining 
to let themselves be made the tools of the northern 
king's ambition. 

The great European struggle of the day, how- 
ever, was that between Spain and France, and for 
some time Cromwell hesitated which side to take. 
He has often been blamed for not striking against 
France, the rising power, whose then youthful 
king was at a later day to threaten all Europe, and 
only to be held in check by coalitions in which 
England was the chief figure. But, though 
France persecuted the Huguenots more or less, 
just as England did the Irish Catholics, she was 
far more advanced than Spain, which was the 
most bigoted and reactionary power of Europe, 
both in religion and in politics. The Spanish 
empire was still very great. Though her power 
on sea had gone, on land she had on the whole 
held her own against the French armies, and, with 
England as her ally, she might for the time being 
have 1 amained the leading power of the Continent. 
This would have been a frightful calamity, and 
Cromwell was right in throwing the weight of his 
sword on the other side of the scale. 

His decision enabled him to do one of the most 
righteous of his many righteous deeds. It was at 
this time that the Duke of Savoy, under ecclesias- 
tical pressure, indulged in dreadful persecutions of 
the humble Protestants of the Vaudois valleys ; per 



220 Oliver Cromwell 

secutions which called forth the noblest of Milton's 
sonnets. Oliver interfered, with fiery indignation, 
on behalf of the Vaudois, threatening that if the 
persecutions continued he would not only bring 
the pressure of the English arms to bear, but 
would hire a great force of mercenaries among the 
Protestant Swiss to invade the territory of the 
Duke of Savoy. Largely through the influence 
of Mazarin he succeeded in having the wrong par- 
tially undone; and later, in the middle of the 
operations against the Spanish armies, he again 
interfered, effectively, with the Cardinal-States- 
man on behalf of his obscure and helpless co- 
religionists in the remote mountain valleys. This 
action was purely disinterested; and those who 
are loudest in their denunciation of Cromwell 
would do well to remember that, if the European 
rulers at the end of the nineteenth century had 
possessed his capacity for generous indignation 
on behalf of the oppressed, the Armenian mas- 
sacres either would never have taken place, or 
would have been followed by the immediate ex- 
pulsion of the Turk from Europe. 

Oliver's first contest with the Spaniards was 
carried on by sea, the great Puritan admiral, 
Blake, winning renown by his victory over the 
forts at Santa Cruz, as he had already won re- 
nown by the way in which he crushed the forces 
of Tunis, and for the first time taught the Moors 



Personal Rule 221 

to respect English arms. An expedition against 
San Domingo by Penn and Venables failed, the 
English leaders being treacherous and inefficient, 
but it resulted in the capture of Jamaica and the 
founding of English power in the West Indies. 
On land, as the result of the convention with 
France, the English fleet deprived the Spaniards in 
the Netherlands of assistance from the sea, while 
an English force of 6,000 troops, clad in the red 
uniform which has since become distinctive of the 
British army, was sent to serve under Turenne. 
They overthrew the flower of the Spanish infantry, 
and won the heartiest praise from the great French 
leader. The help given by Cromwell was decisive ; 
the Spaniards were beaten and forced to make 
peace. By this peace France became the first 
power on the Continent, but a power heartily 
afraid of England while Cromwell lived, and 
obliged to yield him Dunkirk as the price of his 
services. The possession of Dunkirk put a com- 
plete stop to the piracy which had ravaged British 
commerce, and gave to Cromwell a foothold on 
the Continent which rendered him able to enforce 
from his neighbors whatever consideration the 
honor and interest of England demanded. 

Meanwhile, the tone of his Court was a model 
of purity and honesty. Alone among the Courts 
of Europe in that age, under Cromwell no man 
could rise who was profligate in private life, or 



222 Oliver Cromwell 

corrupt in public life. How he had risen socially 
is shown by the fact that his remaining daughters 
now married into the nobility. His domestic rela- 
tions were exceptionally tender and beautiful, and 
his grief at the loss of his mother and his favorite 
daughter — his favorite son was already dead — 
was very great. His letters to and about his sons 
are just what such letters should be. He explains 
that he does not grudge them "laudable recrea- 
tions nor honorable carriage in them," nor any 
legitimate expense, but that he does emphatically 
protest against "pleasure and self-satisfaction 
being made the business of a man's life." 

The time had now come, however, when Oliver 
was to leave alike the family for whom he had so 
affectionately cared, and the nation he had loved 
and ruled, and go before the God to whom he ever 
felt himself accountable. When 1658 opened, peace 
and order obtained at home, and the crown had 
been put to England's glory abroad by the victo- 
ries in Flanders and the cession of Dunkirk. There 
was not the slightest chance of Cromwell's hold 
on the nation being shaken. So far as human eye 
could see, his policy was sure to triumph, as long 
as he lived ; but he was weakened by his hard and 
strenuous life, and the fever, by which he had been 
harassed during his later campaigns, came on him 
with renewed force. Even his giant strength had 
been overtaxed by the task of ruling England 



Personal Rule 223 

alone, and, as he conscientiously believed, for her 
highest interest. Supreme though his triumph 
seemed to outsiders, he himself knew that he 
had failed to make the effects of this triumph 
lasting, though he never seems to have suspected 
that his failure was due to his incapacity to subor- 
dinate his own imperious will so that he might 
work with others. He saw clearly the chaos into 
which his death would plunge England, and he 
did not wish to die ; but as he grew weaker he felt 
that his hour was come, and surrendered himself 
to the inevitable. 

" I would be willing to live to be further ser- 
viceable to God and His people," muttered the 
dying ruler, showing, as ever, his strange mixture 
of belief in himself and trust in the Most High; 
"but my work is done! Yet God will be with 
His people!" 

September came in with a terrible storm, the 
like of which had rarely been known in England, 
and as it subsided, on September 3, the day which 
had witnessed the victories of Dunbar and Wor- 
cester, the soul of the greatest man who has ruled 
England, since the days of the Conquest, passed 
quietly away. 1 

1 In the queer little weekly paper " The Commonwealth 
Mercury," of the issue " From Thursday, September 2d to 
Thursday, September 9th, 1658," which contains an account 
of Cromwell's death and of his son's installation, it happens 
that there is also an advertisement of a pamphlet : "A few 



224 Oliver Cromwell 

With his death came the chaos he had fore- 
seen, though he had not foreseen that it could be 
averted only by the substitution of some form of 
self-government by the people, for the arbitrary 
rule of one man — however great and good that 
man might be. For a few months his son, Rich- 
ard, ruled as Protector in his stead, but, the Pro- 
tectorate having become in effect a despotism, it 
was sure to slip from any but Oliver's iron grasp. 
Richard called a Parliament, but Parliaments had 
been hopelessly discredited by Oliver's method of 
dealing with them. The army revolted, forced 
the dismissal of the Parliament, and then the 
abdication of Richard. Richard's abler brother, 
Henry, who was governing Ireland as deputy, 
resigned also, and the Cromwells passed out of 
history. 

For some months there was confusion worse 
confounded, and the whole nation turned toward 
Charles II., and the reestablishment of the Stuart 
kingship. Monk, the ablest of Cromwell's gen- 
erals, a soldier who cared little for forms of civil 
government, who had already fought for the 
Stuarts against the Parliament, and who would 
have stood by Richard had Richard possessed 

sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a damned Soul : By that 
poor servant of Jesus Christ, John Bunyan." Cromwell, Mil- 
ton, Bunyan — what can non-Puritan England, of their day, 
show to match these three names ? 



Personal Rule 225 

the strength to stand by himself, threw his weight 
in favor of the exiled king, and thereby prevented 
the slightest chance of opposition. Charles II. 
returned, greeted with transports of frantic delight 
by seemingly almost the whole people. 

The King and his followers then took revenge 
on the dead body of the man whose living eyes 
they had never dared to face. The bones of 
Cromwell, of his mother, and of Ireton, were dis- 
interred and thrown into a lime-pit ; and the head 
of the great Protector was placed on a pole over 
Westminster Hall, there to stand for twenty years. 

The skull of the mighty crown -grasper, before 
whose untamable soul they had shuddered in 
terror, was now set on high as a target for the 
jeering mockery of all who sang the praises of the 
line of libertines and bigots to whom the English 
throne had been restored. For twenty-eight 
shameful years the Restoration lasted; years of 
misgovemment and persecution at home, of 
weakness abroad, of oppression of the weak, and 
obsequious servility to the strong; years when 
the Court of England — devoid of one spark of 
true greatness of any kind — was a scene of tawdry 
and obscene frivolity. Then, once again, the 
principles for which, in the last analysis, Cromwell 
and the Puritans stood, triumphed; the Dutch 
stadtholder came over the narrow seas to ascend 
the throne of England; and once more the 
15 



226 Oliver Cromwell 

current of her national life set toward political, 
intellectual, and religious liberty. 

Cromwell and the Puritans had gone too far, 
and the reaction against them had been so violent 
that those who called William of Orange into 
England dared not invoke the memory of the 
mighty dead lest they should hurt the cause of 
the living. Nevertheless, the Revolution of 1688 
was in reality but the carrying on of the work 
which had been done in the middle of the century. 
James II. could never have been deposed had not 
Charles I. been executed. The men of the second 
Revolution had learned the moderation which 
the men of the first had lacked. They were care- 
ful not to kill the king of whom they wished to rid 
themselves; for though, by every principle of 
equity, a tyrant who has goaded his people into 
revolution — like the leader of an unjustifiable 
rebellion — should suffer the fate which he has 
brought on so many others, yet, as a matter of 
fact, it is often unwise to treat him as he deserves, 
because he has become a symbol to his followers, 
each of whom identifies himself with the man 
whose cause he has been supporting, and in whose 
name he has been fighting, and resents, with pas- 
sionate indignation, any punishment visited upon 
his chief as a wrong in which he personally shares. 
The men of 1688 were, as a whole, actuated by far 
less lofty motives than the men of 1648 ; but they 



Personal Rule 227 

possessed the inestimable advantages of common 
sense, of moderation, of readiness to accept com- 
promises. They made no attempt to realize the 
reign of the saints upon earth ; and therefore they 
were able to work a permanent betterment in 
mundane affairs, and to avoid provoking a violent 
reaction. William, both by position and by tem- 
per, was far better fitted than great Oliver to sub- 
mit to interference with his plans, to get on with 
representative bodies of freemen, and to make the 
best he could out of each situation as it arose, 
instead of indignantly setting his own will above 
law and above the will of the majority, because 
for the moment the result might be better for 
himself and the nation. Speaker Reed once said, 
that "in the long run, the average sense of the 
many is better for the many than the best sense 
of any one man ;" and this is undoubtedly true of 
all people sufficiently high in the scale to be fit for 
self-government . 

Oliver surely strove to live up to his lights as 
he saw them. He never acted in levity, or from 
mere motives of personal aggrandizement, and he 
saw, with sad, piercing eyes, the dangers that 
rolled around the path he had chosen. He acted 
as he did because he conscientiously felt that only 
thus could he meet the needs of the nation. He 
said to the second Protectorate Parliament: "I 
am a man standing in the place I am in ; which 



I 



228 Oliver Cromwell 

place I undertook, not so much out of hope of 
doing any good, as out of a desire to prevent mis- 
chief and evil — which I did see was imminent on 
the nation (for we were running along into con- 
fusion and disorder, and would have necessarily- 
run into blood)." 

We are often told that the best of all possible 
governments would be a benevolent despotism. 
Oliver's failure is a sufficient commentary upon 
this dictum of the parlor doctrinaires. There 
never has been, and probably never will be, an- 
other despotism where the despot so sincerely 
strove to do, for a people capable of some measure 
of freedom, better than they themselves would 
have done with that freedom. The truth is, that 
a strong nation can only be saved by itself, and 
not by a strong man, though it can be greatly 
aided and guided by a strong man. A weak 
nation may be doomed anyhow, or it may find its 
sole refuge in a despot; a nation struggling out 
of darkness may be able to take its first steps only 
by the help of a master hand, as was true of 
Russia, under Peter the Great; and if a nation, 
whether free or unfree, loses the capacity for self- 
government, loses the spirit of sobriety and of 
orderly liberty, then it has no cause to complain 
of tyranny; but a really great people, a people 
really capable of freedom and of doing mighty 
deeds in the world, must work out its own destiny, 



Personal Rule 229 

and must find men who will be its leaders — not its 
masters. Cromwell could, in all probability, have 
been such a leader at the end as he was during his 
early years of public life ; and when he permitted 
himself to fall from the position of a leader among 
free men, to that of a master over men for whose 
welfare he sincerely strove, but in whose freedom 
he did not believe, he marred the great work he 
had done. Nevertheless, it was a very great work. 
There are dark blots on his career — especially his 
Irish policy — but on the whole he was a mighty 
force for good and against evil, and the good 
that he did, though buried for the moment with 
his bones, rose again and has lived ever since, 
while the evil has long withered, or is now wither- 
ing. The English-speaking peoples are free, and 
for good or for ill hold their destinies in their own 
hands. 

The effect of the attitude which not only the 
Puritans, but all other Englishmen of every 
creed, assumed toward Ireland from the days of 
Queen Mary to the days of King George the 
Fourth, was such as to steep the island in cen- 
turies of misery, and to leave in her people a bitter 
and enduring hatred against England. Yet this 
attitude has produced one result of the most un- 
foreseen kind. Had the Irish remained a Celtic 
nation, separate in speech and government from 
Great Britain, they could have had no share in 



230 Oliver Cromwell 

the expansion of the English race, or at least 
could have played only a very subordinate part. 
As it is, in the great English-speaking common- 
wealths that have grown up in North America 
and Australasia, the descendants of the Irish now 
stand on an exact equality with those of the 
Scotch and English, and furnish their full propor- 
tion of leadership in the government of the com- 
munities; while in all these English-speaking 
countries the Catholic Church has become one of 
the leading churches and has had its course of 
development determined by the fact that the con- 
trolling force within it has been Irish. The Eng- 
lish Protestants failed to impress their creed upon 
Ireland, but they did impress their language, and 
did bring Ireland under their own government. 
The strange outcome has been that the creed they 
hated now flourishes side by side, on equal terms, 
with the creeds they professed, in the distant con- 
tinents held in common by their children and by 
the children of those against whom they warred. 
In these new continents all, Catholics and Prot- 
estants alike, are wedded to the principles of politi- 
cal liberty for which the Puritans fought, and 
have grown to extend to all creeds the principles 
of religious liberty in which only the best and 
most advanced Puritans believed. Let us most 
earnestly hope that, while avoiding the Puritan 
fanaticism and intolerance, the Puritan lack of 



Personal Rule 231 

charity and narrowness, we may not lose the Puri- 
tan loftiness of soul and stern energy in striving 
for the right, than which no nation could ever 
have more precious heritages. 

With Oliver's death his memory passed under 
a cloud, through which his greatness was to be 
but dimly seen until generations of men had lived 
and died. He left many descendants, and there 
are now in England, and also in America, and 
possibly Australia, very many men and women, 
in all ranks of life, who have his blood in their 
veins — though in the direct line his name has 
died out. Even during the present century, 
when among the English upper classes it was still 
customary to speak of him with horror, his very 
descendants in certain families felt keen shame 
for the deeds of their great forefather. With a 
childishness in no way above that of a Congo 
savage, it was actually the fashion in some of 
these families to make the children do penance 
on the anniversary of the death of Charles II., as 
a kind of atonement for the deeds of Cromwell. 
The grotesque nature of this performance is 
added to by the fact that in that very society a 
peculiarly high place of honor was accorded to 
the titled descendants of Charles- II. and his mis- 
tresses. One hardly knows whether to be most 
amused or indignant at such fantastic incapacity 
to appreciate what was really noble and what 



232 Oliver Cromwell 

really ignoble. The men among whom such 
false conventions obtained could not be expected 
to see in its true proportions the form of mighty 
Oliver, looming ever larger across the intervening 
centuries. Sooner or later, justice will be done 
him; sooner or later, he will be recognized, not 
only as one of the greatest of all Englishmen, and 
by far the greatest ruler of England itself, but as 
a man who, in times that tried men's souls, dealt 
with vast questions and solved tremendous prob- 
lems ; a man who erred, who was guilty of many 
shortcomings, but who strove mightily toward the 
light as it was given him to see the light ; a man 
who had the welfare of his countrymen and the 
greatness of his country very close to his heart, 
and who sought to make the great laws of right- 
eousness living forces in the government of the 
world. 



INDEX 



Abolition, in United States, 
186 

Abolitionists, 99, 185 

Adamses, the, 35 

Agathokles, 203 

Ale-houses, suppressed under 
Protectorate, 206, 207 

Alva, 150 

America, Protestants and 
Catholics in, 11; freedom 
from militarism in eigh- 
teenth century, 19; power 
of compromise after Revo- 
lution, 96; true greatness 
of, 173; city government 
in, 207; Cromwell's de- 
scendants in, 231 

American Civil War, com- 
pared with English Civil 
Wars, 5, 6, 58, 59; citizen 
soldiers in, 62; West Point 
in, 65 ; cavalry in, 67 ; com- 
promises after, 98; gener- 
osity of victors, 209 

American Revolution, War 
of the, comparisons with 
English Revolution of 
1688, 6; with English Civil 
Wars, 59; its citizen sol- 
diers, 62; regular soldiery, 
88; compromises after, 96; 
Washington, 97; events 
preceding, 109; Continen- 
tal Congress in, 171, clem- 
ency following, 209 

Americans, majority rule nat- 
ural to, 24; regicide senti- 
mentalists among, 133; 



religious toleration, 155; 
character of, in eighteenth 
century, 184 

Anabaptists, 74, 98, 138, 206, 
212 

Anglican Church, its Pres- 
byterian trend under Eliza- 
beth, 22; its influence on 
Charles I.'s Third Parlia- 
ment, 28 

Antichrist, 218 

Appomattox, Sheridan at, 165 

Argyle, joins Whigamore 
raid, 125; ally of Crom- 
well, 125 

Armenian massacres, 220 

Arminianism, in Holland, 12 

Arminius, 12 

Army, the Cavalier, 61 

Army, American Continental, 

97 
Army, the English, in Civil 

Wars, composition of, 58; 
first raised by nobles, 61; 
reorganization of Parlia- 
mentary forces, 90; char- 
acter in Charles I.'s time, 
103; dissensions, 104 etseq.; 
its strength against the 
Parliament, 1 1 1 ; its strug- 
gles with the King and Par- 
liament, 112 et seq.; its 
spirit, 116; odds against it 
in Second Civil War, 119; 
Charles I.'s negotiations 
with, 129; march into Lon- 
don, 131 ; revolt suppressed 
by Cromwell, 138; its dis- 



233 



234 



Index 



tinctive character, 140; its 
influence in Long Parlia- 
ment, 171 et seq.; offset by 
navy, 178; rejects Parlia- 
mentary measures, 17S; 
supports Cromwell, 179; 
attitude under Protector- 
ate, 192; protests against 
Cromwell's accepting 
Kingship, 207; serves 
under Turenne, 221; revolts 
against Richard C r o m- 
well, 224 

Army, the Scottish, gives up 
Charies I., 112 

Artillery, chief means of as- 
sault in Cromwell's time, 5 7 

Assembly, formed under 
Protectorate, iS2,i8$etseq. 

Associations, of counties, 60; 
assessed for Parliamenta- 
rians, 76. See also Eastern 
Association 

Astley, Sir Jacob, quoted, 95 

Aston, Sir Arthur, at Drog- 
heda, 148, 149 

Atlantic Ocean, the, 173 

Australasia, 230; English ex- 
pansion there, 230 

Australia, Cromwell's descen- 
dants in, 231 

Australians, in South Africa, 
64 

Balgony, Lord, at Marston 
Moor, 84 

Baltic Sea, the, 219 

Baptists, the, origin under 
James I., 22; tolerated by 
Cromwell, 75; army senti- 
ment toward, 103; Parlia- 
mentary hatred of, in; 
under the Protectorate, 

193 

Barbadoes, Irish sent as 

slaves there, 149 
Barbon, "Praise-God," 184 



" Barebones"Parliament, for- 
mation of, 184, 1 87 et seq.; 
attacks Courts of Chancery, 

193- 205 
Basing House, capture of, 94 
Baxter, 71 
Beard, Thomas, Cromwell's 

tutor, 42 
Bedford, Earl of, 44 
Bench and bar, courage in, 

Berwick, seized by Royal- 
ists, 116 

Bishops, the, attitude of, to- 
ward Thirty Years' War, 
29; Parliamentary resolu- 
tions against, 30; army 
sentiment toward, 103 

Bishops' Wars, the cause of, 
3 9 ; Scotch share in , 119 

Blake, Admiral, in Parlia- 
ment, 112; defeats Prince 
Rupert, 125; his great 
fame, 176, 177, 178; his 
indifference toward Crom- 
well, 194; his victory at 
Santa Cruz, 220 

Boers, as soldiers, 64; belated 
Cromwellians, 139; com- 
pared with Covenanters, 

iS9 

Border, the, in Civil Wars, 52, 
80, 125, 126, 168 

Boston, U. S. A., regicide 
sentimentalismin, 133 

Boston Harbor, tea thrown 
overboard in, 33 

Bouchier, Elizabeth, wife of 
Oliver Cromwell, 41 

Brandenburghers, 219 

Breast-pieces, 57 

Bristol, capture of, 94; Crom- 
well's letter from, 101, 102 

British Islands, the Com- 
monwealth in, 171 

Buchanan, President, his 
views on secession, 158 



Index 



235 



Buckingham, Duke of, his 
corrupt ministry, 25; his 
assassination, 27 

Buff coats, uniform of Par- 
liamentarians, 57,61; worn 
by Royalists at Winches- 
ter, 80 

Buisson, de, quoted, 217 

Bunyan, John, 66, 224, 
note 

Bureau of Intelligence, Chief 
of, See Scout-master 

Burleigh House, taken by 
Parliamentarians, 77 

Byzantine Emperors, 166 

Cadiz, Charles I.'s expedition 
against, 25 

Calvin, his zeal for righteous- 
ness, 7 

Calvinism, in Holland, 1 2 ; its 
influence in England, 28 ; in 
Scotland, 159 

Calvinists, their intolerance 
of Roman Catholics, 1 2 

Cambridge, University of, 
Cromwell's residence there, 
41; its plate seized by 
Cromwellians, 67 

Canadians, in South Africa, 
64 

Cannon, Cromwell's lack of, 
at Pembroke, 117 

Captain-General, Cromwell's 
office of, 157, 182 

Carbines, 57; discarded by 
Cromwellians, 76 

Carlyle, taken by Royalists, 
116 

Carlyle, Thomas, his opinion 
of Cromwell, 1, 2; of Pu- 
ritanism, 2; on regicide, 

Carnsworth, Earl of, 92 
Casques, 61 

Catholic Church, its recogni- 
tion in Ireland demanded 



by the Pope, 143; modern 
greatness of, 230 

Catholics, aimed at by Third 
Parliament, 30; unite with 
Royalists and Presbyte- 
rians in Ireland, 115, 116; 
character of, in Ireland, 
141; aid of, for Charles II., 
142; dissensions in Ireland, 
141-144; Cromwellian ha- 
tred of, 147, 155, 156; per- 
secutions of, 209, 210; Maz- 
arin's plea for them in 
England, 212; as land- 
holders in Ireland, 215; 
their share in British ex- 
pansion to-day, 230. See 
also Roman Catholics 

Cavaliers, dress of, 61; at 
Grantham, 76; at Marston 
Moor, 85; at Naseby, 92; 
rising against army, 115; 
support Charles I. in the 
North, 116; Cromwell's 
opinion of, 118; allegiance 
to Charles II. in Scotland, 
166; at Stirling, 168, at 
Worcester, 169 

Cavalry, its superiority to 
infantry, 57, 58; among 
the Royalists, 67; horse 
the true weapon of, 76; 
at Gainsborough, 78, 79; 
Scotch at Marston Moor, 
84, 85; Naseby, 92; Iron- 
sides spirit in, 102; Ham- 
ilton's, 117; at Preston, 
122 

Cavendish, Lord, at Gains- 
borough, 78 

Celtic, 15, 216 

Celts, the, 16, 141, 216 

Censorship of press, estab- 
lished under Protectorate, 
208 

Charles I., his ignoble peace, 
18, 19; his private charac- 



236 



Index 



ter, 24; helplessness of 
English arms under his 
rule, 25; his Third Parlia- 
ment, 26; yields to Petition 
of Right, 27; his dissolu- 
tion of his Third Parlia- 
ment, 30; rejects Petition 
of Right, 31; embarks on 
Bishops' Wars, 39; his at- 
titude toward the Long 
Parliament, 49; betrays 
Strafford, 50; makes terms 
with the Scotch, 53 ; impris- 
ons Puritan leaders, 55 ; his 
adherents in the Com- 
mons, 58 ; marches on Lon- 
don, 68; turn of tide in his 
favor, 76; makes overtures 
to the Irish, 80; defeats 
"Waller at Copredy Bridge, 
87; his army at Newbury, 
89; at Naseby, 91, 93; sur- 
renders to Scotch army, 94 ; 
English servility toward 
him, 97; his treachery, 100; 
supported by Presbyte- 
rians, 104; "the man of 
blood," 109; his non-ac- 
ceptance of his defeat, 1 1 1 ; 
negotiates with the army 
and Parliament, 112 et 
seq. ; Cromwell attempts 
terms with him, 114; 
Yorkshire support for, 117; 
Scotch attitude toward 
him, 118; his tenacity, 127; 
negotiations with the army, 
129; he rejects Fairfax's 
proposals, 130; his trial 
for treason, 131 ; beheaded, 
132; his character, 132, 
135; his policy in Ireland, 
141; Catholic allegiance to 
him, 142; his imprison- 
ment, 143; effect of his 
execution on Ireland, 145; 
his execution, 209 



Charles II., the fleet loyal to 
him, 124; proclaimed King 
at Cork, 145; the Scotch 
declare for him, 156; lands 
In Scotland, 159 et seq.; 
supported by Scotch Cava- 
liers, 166; crosses into Eng- 
land, 168; his escape from 
Worcester, 169; his exile, 
172; influences for his res- 
toration, 201 ; England in 
his time, 217; his re-estab- 
lishment, 224; his mis- 
tresses, 231 

Charles X., of Sweden, 218 

Chester, seized by Royalists, 
116 

Christianity, heterodoxy in 
Parliamentary, 104 

Church and State, Puritan 
theories of, no; reform in, 
188 

Churchmen, arbitrary power 

of, 155 

Civil War. See American 
Civil War 

Civil War, First English, the 
fiery ordeal of, 19; begun 
by Charles, 55; its chief 
leaders cavalrymen, 58; 
its blunders contrasted 
with American Civil War, 
59; English soldiery in, 87; 
its slow progress, 90; type 
of its generals, 91; practi- 
cally ends at Naseby, 93; 
its effects on Cromwell, 99; 
Irish share in, 117; ex- 
change of prisoners, 123 

Civil War, Second English, 
its beginning, 116; ended 
at Preston, 124; results, 126 

Clergy, 75; threatened by 
Protectorate Assembly, 185 

Clonmel, capture of, 157 

Clubmen, peasant organiza- 
tion, 60 



Index 



237 



Cock-fighting, suppressed un- 
der Protectorate, 206 

Colchester, seized by Royal- 
ists, 116; capitulation of, 
124 

Colonial policy, Spain's, 217 

Colonial possessions, Span- 
ish, 218; Dutch, 17 

Commercial policy, Crom- 
well's, in war againstSpain, 
218 

Committee of Both King- 
doms, the, 82, 88 

Committee of Correspond- 
ence, in American Revolu- 
tion, 109 

Committee of the Eastern 
Association, 82 

Common law, the, under the 
Protectorate, 193 

Commons, House of, declares 
against tonnage and 
poundage, 30; triennial 
meetings, 52; favored by 
London, 55; its adherents 
of the King, 58 ; Cromwell's 
share in, 89; the Independ- 
ents, 112; defies the army, 
113, 130; disregards Lords 
intheKing'strial, 131; Par- 
liamentarian leaders, 179; 
Republicans, 197; agree- 
ment with Cromwell, 198. 
See also Parliament; 
Long Parliament, etc. 

Commonwealth, established, 
6 ; reorganizes its forces, 89 ; 
its supremacy, 134; its 
character, 136; European 
attitude against it, 138; 
Cromwell its main support, 
157; authority, 171; its 
religionist enemies, 191; 
civil rights under it, 209 

Commonwealth Mercury, The, 
223, note 

Compromise, Parliamentary 



incapacity for, 97; after 
American Civil War, 98 

Confederacy, the, of Ameri- 
can Southern States, 67, 
88 

Confederates in Ireland, 145 

Congregationalists, origin 
under Elizabeth, 22; iden- 
tified with Independent 
party, 47; tolerated by 
Cromwell, 75; in Parlia- 
ment, 104; Parliamenta- 
rian hatred of, 1 1 1 ; under 
the Protectorate, 193 

Congress, the American Con- 
tinental, compared with 
Cromwellian Parliaments, 
97-99, 109, 171 

Connaught, 215 

Conquest, the [Norman], 223 

Constitution, the American, 
182, 186, 190, 191 

Constitution, English, 130; 
under the Assembly, 188, 
191; under the Protector- 
ate, 197 

" Constitution-mongers, "Car- 
lyle's sneer at, 5 

Continent, the, character of 
its armies, 58; Cromwell's 
interest in its politics, 217; 
the power of France on, 
221 

Continental Army, the Amer- 
ican, 97 

Convention, Constitutional, 
in U. S., 182; in English 
Assembly, 185, 188 

Coote, holds Derry for Parli- 
amentarians, 145 

Copredy Bridge, Battle of, 

87 
Cork, Charles II. proclaimed 
King there, 145; Crom- 
well s letter from there, 

154 
Cornwall, neutrality of, 60 



238 



Index 



Cotton, John, Cromwell's let- 
ter to, 173 

Council of Officers, in Eng- 
lish Assembly, 188, 190 et 
seq. 

Council, the, in Parliamen- 
tary army, 109 

Council of State, the, 182, 188 

Court, purity of Cromwellian, 
221; disgracefulness under 
Restoration, 225 

Courts of Chancery, English, 
175, 186 

Covenant, National, of Scot- 
land, the, 37; taken by 
Parliamentarians, 75; by 
English troopers, 80; Ham- 
litonian devotion to, 118; 
taken by Ulster Scotch, 
142; Fairfax declines cam- 
paign against, 157; oath 
taken by Charles II., 159; 
Cromwell's exposition of, 
166 et seq. 

Covenanters, the Scotch, de- 
feated by Cromwell, 72; 
intolerance of sectaries, 
in ; treatment of Charles 
II., 159; oppose Puritans 
at Dunbar, 164; persecu- 
ted by Episcopalians, 210 

Creed, in United States, 2,9; 
in Ireland, 216, 230 

Cromwell, Bridget, daughter 
of Oliver, married to Ire- 
ton, 100 

Cromwell, Elizabeth Stew- 
ard, mother of Oliver, 40, 
225 

Cromwell, Henry, son of 
Oliver, 224 

Cromwell, Oliver, his fame, 
1; forces which produced 
him, 7; youth and early 
manhood, 14; seat in Long 
Parliament, 40; parentage 
and birth, 40; his marriage, 



41; his Puritanism, 42; 
hatred of Church of Rome, 
42, 54; removes to Ely, 43; 
supports Petition of Rights, 
43 ; his indifference to po- 
litical theory, 44; his piety, 
45; his religion, 46; person- 
ality, 47, 48; impatience of 
system, 51; his suspicion 
of the Episcopacy, 54; cap- 
tain of 67th Regiment, 55; 
his kinsmen at the battle 
of Nottingham, 55; his 
troops, 62; his military 
genius, 66; his troop of 
horse, 67, 70-73; pro- 
moted to a colonelcy, 71; 
his letters, 73; his tolerant 
spirit, 74; bearing toward 
Episcopalians, 75; as cav- 
alry commander, 75; 
dubbed Ironsides by Ru- 
pert, 77 ; his relief of Gains- 
borough, 79 ; atWinceby,79 ; 
his generalship, 81; mem- 
ber of Committee of Both 
Kingdoms, 82; at Marston 
Moor, 83-87; his training 
of troops, 88; distrusted 
by Presbyterians, 88; the 
real head of the army, 90; 
Montrose not comparable 
with him, 91; at Naseby, 
92 et seq.; takes Winches- 
ter, 94; his rule after First 
Civil War, 95; compared 
with William III., 97 et 
seq.; his uncompromising 
spirit, 98; his children's 
marriages, 100; his reli- 
gious spirit, 100, 101; his 
letters and speeches, 101, 
102; on reconstruction, 
105 et seq.; not extreme 
against Charles, 109; efforts 
toward agreement with 
King and Parliament, 113; 



Index 



239 



favors army against Par- 
liamentarians, 114; at 
Pembroke, 117; his view 
of the Scotch, 118; his 
reception at Edinburgh, 
126; his position at close 
of Civil Wars, 126; mo- 
tives for joining Independ- 
ents, 128-130; favors the 
regicide, 131, i33" I 35; his 
ambition, 136; his army, 
140; his Irish campaign, 
145 et seq.; his cruelty at 
Drogheda, 149, 150; Wex- 
ford, 152; contradictions 
of his character, i$^etseq.; 
excellent conduct of Irish 
campaign, 156; summoned 
from Ireland by Parlia- 
ment, 156; advances on 
and retreats from Edin- 
burgh, 161 et seq.; at Dun- 
bar, 164-166; his dispute 
with the Kirk party, 166 
et seq.; his clemency, 168; 
attacks Charles II. at 
Worcester, 169; champions 
Independents, 173; policy 
toward Parliamentarians, 
174 et seq.; his views on 
Dutch War, 178; defeats 
non-reelection bill , 180; 
his statesmanship, 182 et 
seq.; his sermon to the 
Assembly, 185 et seq.; des- 
potism, 188; first Protec- 
tor, 190, 191; his peace 
with the Dutch, 194; his 
conflict with Parliament, 
195 et seq.; his govern- 
ment a tyranny, 203 et seq.; 
suppresses the ale-houses 
206, 207; declines the 
Kingship, 207; his views 
on liberty, 212; interferes 
in Continental affairs, 218 
et seq.; revenges Vaudois 



massacres, 219, 220; con- 
tests Spain on the sea, 220; 
his court, 221; last illness, 
222, 223; death 224; dese- 
cration of his remains by 
Restorationists, 225; com- 
pared with William III., 
226, 227.; political ideals, 
227 et seq.; cruelty of his 
Irish policy, 229; posthu- 
mous reputation, 231 

Cromwell, Richard, son of 
Oliver, as Protector, 224 

Cromwell, Robert, father of 
Oliver, 40; his death, 41 

"Crummle, the curse o'," 
217. See Cromwell, Oli- 
ver, and Ireland 

Cuirassiers, use in Parlia- 
mentary army, 57; at 
Winceby, 79; the Scotch 
at Marston Moor, 85 

Czars, the, 9 

Danes, the, Charles X.'s war 
against, 218 

Dean, Colonel, at Preston, 
121; in Dutch War, 177; 
his rule in Scotland, 213 

Death penalty, a cause of 
sentimentalism, 132, 133; 
its justice on tyrants, 226, 
227 

Declaration, Cromwell's, in 
Ireland, 153, 155 

Democracy, Cromwell's bear- 
ing toward, 204 

Derry, siege of, 145; supports 
Parliamentarians, 147 

De Ruyter, 176 

Despotism, under republics, 
21; under the Stuarts, 27; 
under Cromwell, 206; a 
subject of doctrinaire no- 
tions, 228 

Discipline, a military neces- 
sity, 87; a source of sol- 



240 



Index 



diers' ties, 103; rigidly 
enforced by Cromwell, 147 

Dissenters, persecuted under 
Elizabeth, 22; aimed at by 
Third Parliament, 30; po- 
sition under the Protec- 
torate, 193 

Dragoons, 57, 76; Royalists 
at Winceby, 79 

Drake, 14, 17 

Dreyfus case, the, 21 

Drilling, excellence of Crom- 
well's troops at Winceby, 

79 

Drogheda, siege of, 46, 145; 
Parliamentarian atrocities 
there, 148, 154 etseq. 

Dublin, Puritan rule there, 
141, 142; surrendered to 
Parliamentarians, 143; Su- 
preme Council of, 145; 
siege of, 145; Cromwell's 
troops there, 147 

Duke, Basil, 67 

Dunbar, Leslie engages the 
English there, 163 et seq., 
166, 167; fate of Scotch 
prisoners captured there, 
168; anniversary of, 191, 
223 

Dundalk, surrender of, 145; 
garrisoned by Cromwell, 

Dunkirk, ceded to English, 
221, 222 

Dutch, the, their sailors in 
wars with Spain, 14; op- 
pressions under Spain, 35 ; 
Parliamentarian war with, 
175 etseq.; commercial su- 
premacy, 177; religious tol- 
eration, 193; peace with 
England, 194; war with 
Charles X., 218 

Eastern Association, the, 60; 
the Ironsides in, 77; com- 



mittee of, 82; its infantry 
at Marston Moor, 83-86 ; its 
training, 88; the pattern 
for the New Model, 90. 
See also Associations 

Edgehill, battle of, 68-70; 
Charles I.'s standard-bear- 
er there, 149 

Edinburgh, Laud's attempt 
to introduce the Prayer- 
Book there, 37 ; Cromwell's 
reception there, 126; be- 
sieged by Cromwell, 161; 
surrendered to Cromwell, 
^ 168 

Edinburgh, Governor of, 166 

Eglinton, Earl of, at Marston 
Moor, 84 

Eliot, Sir John, character of, 
26; his leadership in Par- 
liament, 29, 30; his im- 
prisonment, 31; death, 31; 
Charles I.'s vengeance on, 
132 

Elizabeth, Queen, her abso- 
lutism, 8; her bearing to- 
ward Anglican Church, 9; 
yields to the monopolies, 
10; her veiled despotism, 
21; persecutes Dissenters, 
22; her war with Spain on 
the sea, 56; compared with 
Cromwell, 204; Puritan 
persecutions in her reign, 
210 

Ely, home of Cromwell's 
mother, 40, 43 

Ely Cathedral, Cromwell's 
interference there, 75 

England, champion of reli- 
gious liberty, 15, 20; over- 
lordship in Ireland, 15, 16; 
peace under James I., 19; 
rural and agricultural pop- 
ulation, 56; military expe- 
rience, 57; political inca- 
pacity in Cromwell's time, 



Index 



241 



106; relation with Scot- 
land in Second Civil War, 
118; pitted against Scot- 
land under the Common- 
wealth, 158; law of, 175; 
her carrying trade in 
Dutch War, 176; her com- 
mercial greed, 177; self- 
government, 185; political 
freedom, 190; Parliamen- 
tarian supremacy in, 198; 
representative govern- 
ment, 199; condition under 
the Protectorate, 204 et 
seq., 209, 213 et seq., 217; 
her Irish policy, 219; for- 
eign fame, 222; condition 
after Cromwell, 223 et seq.; 
Cromwell's descendants in, 
231 

England's Freedom and Sol- 
diers' Rights, cry of, 114 

English, the, as sailors in the 
Spanish wars, 14; their ex- 
cellence as military mate- 
rial, 56; love of sports, 56; 
serve as troops in Ireland, 
80; at Marston Moor, 83; 
character of, in seven- 
teenth century, 96 et seq.; 
in India, 146; their treat- 
ment of the Irish, 156; 
capacity for self-govern- 
ment, 184; immigrants 
into Ireland, 215; in West 
Indies, 221; expansion of, 
230 

English, Presbyterians for 
the King against the army, 

Episcopacy rejected by the 
Scotch, 36-39; abolition of, 
demanded by Long Parlia- 
ment, 54; under Crom- 
well's government, 211 
Episcopalian Royalists, 171 
Episcopalians, 75; clergy 

16 



hated by Presbyterians, 
88; their intolerance, 100; 
Parliament deserted by 
them, 104; with the Roy- 
alists in Ireland, 117, 127, 
141; under the Protector- 
ate, 191; the Prayer-Book 
denied them by the Com- 
monwealth, 210 

Erse, 216 

Essex, Earl of, leader of Par- 
liamentary forces, 55; his 
Guards, 61; at Northamp- 
ton, 66; his blunders, 87; 
compared with McClellan, 
88 

Essex, Fairfax in, 116 

Europe, armed against 
French Revolutionists, 
115; effect of regicide on, 
133; Dutch position in, 
175, 177; religious toler- 
ance, 193; liberty, 212; 
struggles of Spain and 
France, 219; Turks in, 220; 
profligacy in seventeenth 
century, 221 

Evolution, of English polit- 
ical freedom, 190 

Executive, English and Amer- 
ican, compared, 191 

Expansion, English, 228-229 

Extremists, in English Par- 
liament, 199 

Fairfax, Sir Thomas, his 
friendship with Cromwell, 
76; at Winceby, 79; at 
York, 82; Marston Moor, 
85, 86; in command of 
Parliamentarians, 90; at 
Naseby, 92, 93; captures 
Bristol, 94; returned to 
Parliament, 112; approves 
Cromwell's joining army 
party, 114; his march into 
Kent, 116; takes Colches- 



242 



Index 



ter, 124; Cromwell's letter 
to, 126; counsels modera- 
tion toward the King, 129; 
declines campaign against 
Covenanters, 1 5 7 ; his inde- 
cision, 158 et seq. 

Falkland, Lord, 54 

Fanaticism, consequent on 
English Revolution, 138 

Fifth Monarchy, 98; princi- 
ples of, 108 

Flag, English, Dutch salute 
insisted on, 177 

Flanders, English victories 
in, 222 

Fleet, English, supports Par- 
liamentarians, 117; deserts 
to Royalists, 124; its share 
in Dutch wars, 177; sup- 
ports Cromwell, 182 ; under 
the Protectorate, 192 

Foot, in seventeenth century 
warfare, 57; Parliamenta- 
rians', at Gainsborough, 79; 
Scots', at Marston Moor, 
84. See also Infantry 

Forrest, General, his inferior- 
ity to Grant, 65; compared 
with Montrose, 91 

Fortescue, Sir Faithful, de- 
serts Parliamentarians at 
Edgehill, 68; 

Four Fundamentals, the, 197 

France, serfs of, 56; Prince 
Rupert in, 125; Royalist 
refugees in, 143; Protest- 
ants, 156; in wars with 
Spain, 219; convention 
with England, 221 

Franchise, the, redistribu- 
tion of, under the Protec- 
torate, 190 

Frederick the Great, 140 

Free State, the, 136. See 
also Commonwealth 

French, character of the, in 
eighteenth century, 96, 184 



French Revolution, the, 115 
Frobisher, 14 

Gainsborough, siege of, 78 

Galley slaves, English pris- 
oners as, 124 

Garrison, American Aboli- 
tionist, 98 

Geddes, Jenny, at Edin- 
burgh, 37 

Geneva, 12 

Gentiles, 212 

Gentlemen, Cromwell's opin- 
ion of, 73 

Gentry, English, 56; against 
Charles I., 58; support of 
the King in Wales, 116 

George III., his Government 
rejected by American Con- 
tinental Congress, 35 

George IV., 229 

Germany, English adventur- 
ers in, 56 ; serfs of, 56 

Germans, the, Charles X.'s 
aggressions against, 218 

Gladstone, early writings of, 

47 

Golden Rule, the, 45 

Good government, Crom- 
well's notion of, 197 

Gordon, piety of, compared 
with Cromwell's, 101 

Goring, General, at Marston 
Moor, 84, 86; defeated by 
Fairfax, 94 

Government, its develop- 
ment in Great Britain, 191 ; 
Cromwell's practice of, 203 

Grand Remonstrance, the, 
against Charles I., 54, 55 

Grant, General, his volunteer 
soldiery, 62; his develop- 
ment of troops, 88; his 
superiority to Forrest, 91; 
his political supporters, 99; 
his soldiers, 140; his gener- 
osity, 209 



Index 



243 



Grantham, Cromwell at, 76 

Great Britain, Charles II. 
declared King of, by the 
Scotch, 138; government 
of, 191 ; expansion of, 230 

Greeks, the, under Agatho- 
kles, 203 

Greene, General, 87 

Guards, of Lord Essex, buff 
coats adopted by them as 
uniform , 6 1 ; of Charles I . , 6 1 

Gunpowder, its use in Crom- 
wellian times, 56 

Gunpowder Plot, the, 42 

Gustavus Adolphus, his 
campaign against Spain, 14 ; 
his career, 38, 161 

Hamilton, Duke of, 115; his 
campaigns in Second Civil 
War, 117-119; at Preston, 
122; beheading of, 123; 
Kirk attitude toward him, 
160 

Hampden, John, Carlyle's 
opinion of, 3; originality 
of type of, 5 ; his tolerance, 
5; refuses to pay Ship 
Money, 34, 44 ; his relations 
with Cromwell, 44; his 
Puritanism denned, 48; 
compared with Cromwell, 
51; his imprisonment, 55; 
a cousin of Cromwell, 55; 
uniform of his regiment, 
61; at Edgehill, 69; Crom- 
well's opinion of his troops, 
70; his death, 77; in Par- 
liament, 171 

Hapsburg, House of, in Spain 
and Austria, 17 

Harrison, English Republi- 
can general, 130; his devo- 
tion to Cromwell, 180; calls 
musketeers into Parlia- 
ment, 180; his fanaticism, 
192 



Hawkins, Admiral, in Span- 
ish wars, 13,17 
Hein, Piet, Dutch admiral in 

Spanish wars, 1 7 
Helmets, carried by Crom- 

wellian cavalry, 57 
Henrietta Maria, wife of 

Charles I., 24 
Henry, Patrick, compared 

with Pym, 35 
Henry VIII., King of Eng- 
land, his bearing toward 
the Reformation, 7; his 
dealings with lower classes, 
8; with the Anglican 
Church, 9; his career im- 
possible under a Long Par- 
liament, 11; his oppres- 
sions, 22 
High Court of Justice, 

Charles I. tried by, 131 
Highlanders, the Scotch, in 
the Civil Wars, 91; their 
chiefs at Stirling, 168; at 
Worcester, 169 
Highlands, the, General 

Monk in, 194 
Hofer's Tyrolese, 64 
Holland, her stand against 
Spain, 14; her colonial 
empire, 17; House of 
Orange in, 130; effect of 
regicide on, 133; alliance 
with, desired by Cromwell, 
178 
Horse (cavalry), of the Par- 
liamentarians, 55 ; at Edge- 
hill, 68; Winceby, 80; of 
the Parliamentarians at 
Marston Moor, 83-85; 
maneuvres with, at Mars- 
ton Moor, 85; use of, at 
Naseby, 92; in retreat at 
Preston, 122, 123; service 
at Dunbar, 164 et seq. 
Horse-racing, suppressed un- 
der the Protectorate, 206 



244 



Index 



Howard, English admiral, 13 

Huguenots, Charles I.'s 
feeble move against them, 
25; persecuted in France, 
219 

Hume, his opinion of Crom- 
well's speeches, 196 

Huntingdon, birthplace of 
Cromwell, 40-43 

Immigration of the English 
and Scotch into Ireland, 

2I 5 

Inchiquin, Lord, Parliamen- 
tarian leader in Ireland, 
142, 144; captures Drog- 
heda, 145 

Independent Movement, the 
so-called, under Elizabeth, 
22 

Independents, English polit- 
ical party, 47; Cromwell at 
head of, 47 ; bearing toward 
the Presbyterians, 77; real 
source of their power the 
Ironsides, 77 ; hated by the 
Presbyterians, 88; their 
strength in the army, 90; 
their spirit commended by 
Cromwell, 102; their pro- 

?osed reconciliation with 
arliamentarians, no; 
Charles I.'s designs on 
them, in; they take refuge 
in the army, 114; conquer- 
ors of the Royalists, 115; 
their prompt action in Sec- 
ond Civil War, 116; their 
political isolation, 127; 
rupture with Irish Presby- 
terians, 145; their strength 
in the Commonwealth, 158; 
in Parliament, 171 et seq.; 
support of Cromwell in 
the Rump Parliament, 182; 
under the Protectorate, 
192, 212 



Indian Mutiny, compared 
with state of Ireland under 
Cromwell, 146 

Infantry, Parliamentarians', 
at Nottingham, 55; use of, 
in Cromwell's time, 57, 58; 
in action at Marston Moor, 
83; at Naseby, 92; its im- 
portance at Preston, 122; 
at Dunbar, 164; Spanish, 
defeated by British in the 
Netherlands, 221 

Inquisition, the, in Spain, 14; 
the handmaid of tyranny, 
16; religious aspect of, 46 

Instrument of Government, 
the, 189 et seq.; recognized 
by Parliament, 197 

Insurgents, the Irish, 141 et 
seq. 

Ireland, England's treatment 
of, 15, 16; priesthood loyal 
to its peasantry, 16; Prot- 
estantism in, 16; its pros- 
perity under Strafford, 34; 
revolts against Charles I.'s 
government, 54; English 
troops in, 80 ; unites against 
the Parliament, 115; com- 
plex political conditions, 
117; its loyalty, 138; in- 
vaded by Cromwell, 139 
et seq.; Cromwellian atroci- 
ties, 151; subjugation by 
Parliamentarians, 172; dis- 
content under the Protec- 
torate, 213; under Rich- 
ard Cromwell's rule, 224 
its misery under English 
reigns, 229 

Ireton, Henry, character of, 
6 ; captain of troop in Sixty- 
seventh Regiment, 55; at 
Naseby, 92, 93; marriage 
with Bridget Cromwell , 1 00 ; 
his leadership of the army, 
112; approves Cromwell's 



Index 



245 



joining the army party, 
114; remonstrates against 
the King, 129; counsels 
mercy toward Charles I., 
131; desecration of his 
remains, 225 

Irish, the, Charles I.'s over- 
tures to, 80; Puritan cru- 
elty toward, 124; Catholics' 
treaty with Charles II., 
143; troops at Dundalk, 
151; English treatment of, 
156, 219, 229 

Ironsides, the, real power of 
the Independents, 77; in 
action at Marston Moor, 
83, 85; membership in 
Eastern Association, 90; 
type of, 91; their army 
spirit, 102; support the 
army party, 116; at Pres- 
ton, 121; as volunteers, 
139; veterans in Ireland, 

147 
" Irreconcilables," 191 
Issues, political, not always 

sharply drawn, 174 
Ivan the Terrible, 203 

Jackson, Andrew, his back- 
woodsmen, 64 

Jackson, "Stonewall," re- 
semblance to Cromwell 
and Ireton, 6; his piety, 
101 ; his strategy compared 
with Cromwell's, 165; 

Jamaica, taken by the Eng- 
lish, 221 

James I., his ignoble peace, 
18, 19; his belief in despot- 
ism, 21; his weak policy 
toward Parliament, 22; ab- 
solutism in Church and 
State, 24; his policy in 
Ireland, 140, 141 

Jehovah, invoked in massa- 
cres, 154 



Jews, massacres of, com- 
pared with Puritans', 155; 
their settlement in London, 



212 



Johnston, American general, 
development of his troops 
compared with Cromwell's, 
88 

Jones, Colonel, Puritan lead- 
er, defeats Preston near 
Dublin, 144; makes terms 
with Irish Papal party, 
144; routs Ormond at Dub- 
lin, 145 

Joyce, Cornet, 112 

Judges, under the Protec- 
torate, 192 

Kent, Fairfax in, 116 

Kentucky, neutrality of, in 
American Civil War, 60 

Kerne, the, in Ireland, 16; 
Queen Mary's expulsion 
of the, 16 

Kilkenny, Cromwell's mani- 
festo there, 153 

King Jesus, cry of, 108, 138 

Kings, their divine right, 20; 
English belief in, 95, 96; 
office of, abolished by the 
Commonwealth, 136; arbi- 
trary power of, 155 

Kingship, offered to Crom- 
well, 207 

Kirk party, in Scotland, 125; 
Cromwell's dispute with, 
166, 167 

Kirk, the, in Scotland, 160, 
161 ; its leaders urge Leslie 
on at Edinburgh, 163, 166; 
its forces broken, 168 

Knox, John, his influence on 
Scotch Calvinism, 18 

Laissez-faire economists, 176 

Lambert, Puritan general, 

sent to the North, 116; 



246 



Index 



in action at Preston, 119- 
123 

Lancashire, Presbyterian ris- 
ing there, 116 

Lancers, 57; the Scots', at 
Marston Moor, 84; at Dun- 
bar, 164 

Landed proprietors, interests 
of, threatened under the 
Protectorate, 186; English, 
in Ireland, 215, 216 

Langdale, Sir Marmaduke, 
Cromwell's foe at Naseby, 
1 1 6 ; his command at Pres- 
ton, 1 19, 121 

Laud, his hostility to Protest- 
ants, 28, 29; his ecclesias- 
tical absolutism, 32; be- 
comes archbishop, 32; his 
"thorough" policy, 34; 
attempts to introduce cere- 
monials at Edinburgh, 37; 
supports Charles I. against 
Short Parliament, 39; im- 
prisoned by the Parlia- 
mentarians, 50; his execu- 
tion, 77; his intolerance 
compared with Presbyte- 
rians', 104 

Laws, English, considered 
by Parliamentarians, 174 

Lawyers, Cromwell's dislike 
of, 175, 186 

Lee, American Confederate 
general, his volunteer sol- 
diery, 62; development of 
his troops, 88; his general- 
ship compared with Crom- 
well's, 91 

Legislative power under the 
Protectorate, 190 

Lenthall, Speaker of House 
of Commons, 174 

Leslie, David, Scottish leader, 
his service under Gusta- 
vus Adolphus. 161; his 
defence of Edinburgh, 162 



et seq.; operations at Dun- 
bar, 163-166 

Levellers, the, English Par- 
liamentary party, dis- 
trusted by Cromwell, 107; 
their agitation, 114; their 
threatening attitude to- 
ward Cromwell, 137, 138; 
against the Commonwealth 
158; suppressed under the 
Protectorate, 206 

Leven, Earl of, Scottish 
leader, besieges York, 82; 
at Marston Moor, 83 

Liberty, political and reli- 
gious, under the Stuarts, 
23; Cromwell's views on, 
103; under the Protector- 
ate, 190 

Lieutenant-general, Crom- 
well's rank of, 138 

Life Guards, Charles I.'s, 61 

Lincoln, American President, 
his candidacy in 1864, 99; 
his first election, 187; com- 
pared with Cromwell, 200, 
201 

London, its sympathy with 
the Commons, 55; unifica- 
tion of the Parliamentary 
troops there, 61 ; its troops 
at Copredy Bridge, 87; 
Presbyterians of, 104; its 
mobs in the army party, 
114; Presbyterian com- 
motions there, 116; the 
army's march into, 130; 
Cromwell's return to, 157, 
174; Jewish settlement in, 
213 

Long Parliament, spirit of 
the, 5; men of, 11; its 
grievances compared with 
American Continental Con- 
gress's, 35; meets at West- 
minster, 41; Cromwell's 
issue with army party 



Index 



247 



against it, 1 14 ; the remnant 
of, 171; its dissolution, 180, 
181, 194, 197, 198; com- 
parison with the Protec- 
torate, 208. See also Par- 
liament, Rump, etc. 

Lord Protector, position of, 
190; Cromwell as, 205 

Lords, House of, in Charles 
I.'s trial for treason, 131; 
abolished under the Com- 
monwealth, 136 

Louis XIV., 156 

Louis XV., 156 

Lower classes in England, 
their discontent under the 
Tudors, 10; incapacity for 
political combination, 10 

Lucas, Sir Charles, repulsed 
by Scotch at Marston 
Moor, 84, 86 

Luther, his zeal for righteous- 
ness, 7 

Lutherans, intolerant spirit 
of, 12 

Lynch law, occasional need 
of, 52 



Macaulay, Lord, his opinion 
of Cromwell, 1 

McClellan, American general, 
compared with Essex, 88; 
attitude of Abolitionists 
toward, 99; Democratic 
support of, 200 

Major-generals, government 
of, under the Protectorate, 
205, 207 

Manchester, Earl of, Parlia- 
mentary leader, 56; com- 
mands Eastern Associa- 
tion, 81 ; at Marston Moor, 
83; denounced by Crom- 
well in Parliament, 89; 
Cromwell's speech to, 105 

Marlborough, Duke of, 140 



Marriage, civil, proposed un- 
der the Protectorate, 186 

Marston Moor, Battle of, 83- 
87, 90, 91, 92; Scotch 
share in, 119; David Les- 
lie at, 161 

Mary, Queen, her expulsion 
of the Irish kerne, 16; her 
treatment of Protestants, 
210; Irish policy, 229 

Maryland, 161 

Mass, the, denied to Irish by 
Cromwell, 152; prohibited 
under the Protectorate, 1 9 1 

Maurice of Orange, 14 

Mazarin, French Cardinal, 
16; Cromwell's reply to, 
212; co-operates with 
Cromwell, 220 

Middle classes in England, 
powerful under the Tu- 
dors, 10; strength among 
Parliamentarians, 66 

Midianitish woman, the, 154 

Militarism, English, avoid- 
ance of, under James I., 19 

Military rule, Cromwell's, 
205, 206 

Military service, not differ- 
entiated on land and sea 
in seventeenth century, 
177 

Military type, the, in Crom- 
wellian army, 103; influ- 
enced by religious zeal, 184 

Militia, compared with regu- 
lar soldiery, 63; at Cop- 
redy Bridge, 87; levy sys- 
tem of, 90 

Mill Mount, 149 

Milton, his contempt of polit- 
ical dreamers, 20; his Puri- 
tanism, 48; his political 
ideas, 107; approves Crom- 
well's joining with army 
party, 114; his views on 
the regicide, 133; supports 



248 



Index 



the Protectorate, 202; son- 
net on the Vaudois, 220; 
his greatness, 224, note 

Ministers, their position un- 
der the Protectorate, 193 

Moderate party, the, in the 
Long Parliament, 53 

Monarchy, Cromwell's dread 
of, 189, 204 

Monasteries, Cromwell's an- 
cestors benefited by their 
spoliation, 42 

Monk, General George, 80; 
at Dundalk, 145; as naval 
commander, 177, 194; his 
rule in Scotland, 213; sup- 
ports Charles II., 224 

Monopolies, under Elizabeth, 
10 

Montrose, Earl of, not a pro- 
fessional soldier, 66; his 
victories in Scotland, 90, 
91; defeated at Philip- 
haugh, 94; aided by Irish 
troops, 142; his death, 
160 

Moors, defeated by Blake at 
Tunis, 220 

Morgan, American Confed- 
erate commander, his cav- 
alry, 67 

Mountain, the, see French 
Revolution, 115 

Munro, commands Hamil- 
tonian cavalry, 117; at 
Ulster, 118; moves toward 
Preston, 119; retreats 
across the border, 125; 
bearing toward Charles 
II., 142, 145 

Munster, Royalist Protest- 
ants in, 144 

Muscovites, 203 

Musketeers, clumsiness of 
their weapons, 57; tactical 
uses of, 57; at Winwick 
Church, 123; their appear- 



ance in the House of Com- 
mons, 181 

Nantes, Edict of , 38 

Napoleon, 95; his unscrupu- 
lousness, 99, 184 

Naseby, Battle of, 91; Sir 
Marmaduke Langdale at, 
116 

Navigation Acts, 176 

Navy, the English, its growth, 
176, 178; in Dutch wars, 
194. See also Fleet 

Netherlands, the, British ad- 
venturers in, 56; oppres- 
sions there compared with 
the Irish, 141, 150; Eng- 
lish and Spanish in, 221 

Neutrality, in English Civil 
Wars, 60; in Kentucky, 60 

Newburn, Battle of, 40 

Newbury, Battle of, 89 

Newcastle, Cromwell's letter 
to the Commandant there, 
167 

Newcastle, Lord, besieges 
Gainsborough, 78, 79; his 
defence of York, 82; at 
Marston Moor, 83, 85 

New England, 173 

New Model, the, in Crom- 
wellian army, 61, 90, 91; 
strained relations with 
Independents, 102; at- 
tempted disbandment of, 
112; results in Indepen- 
dents' army, 115; its vet- 
erans in Ireland, 147 

New World, the, America's 
position in, 173 

New York, regicide senti- 
mentalism in, 133 

North America, 186, 230 

North of England, the, Roy- 
alist rising in, 116 

Northampton, Essex assem- 
bles troops there, 66 



Index 



249 



Northumbrian Regiment, 

Newcastle's, 85 
Nottingham Castle, scene of 

beginning of Civil Wars, 

55; Royalists there, 66; 

held by Cromwell, 77 

Offence, the best defence of 
nations, 159 

Old-English Catholics, in Ire- 
land, 141 

"Old Noll," 213 

Old Testament, the, Puritan- 
ism in, 154 

O'Neil, Irish Catholic leader, 
143, 144; joins Ormond, 
145 ; his troops in Ireland, 

1 53 
Orange, House of, 130 
Ormond, Earl of, leader of 
loyal Irish, 141, 143; sur- 
renders Dublin, 143; heads 
moderate Irish Catholics, 
144; his supporters in Ire- 
land, 145; his troops at 
Drogheda, 148; in Ireland, 

1 53 
"Ossawatomie Brown," 140 

Pale, the, in Ireland, 141 
Papacy, the, Henry VIII. 's 
attitude toward, 7; "pa- 
pacy or prelacy," 191 
Papal nuncio, in Ireland, 143 
Parliament, Pym's view of 
government by, 5; grow- 
ing powers under Elizabeth 
and James, 21; Charles I.'s 
third, 26 ; its struggles with 
the King, 28; Covenant 
taken by, 75; Cromwell's 
speech against the generals 
as members in, 89; Crom- 
well's attitude toward, 97; 
factions after First Civil 
War, 102, 104. et seq.; army 
majority in, 112; negotia- 



tions with King and army, 
112; Irishcoalition against, 
115; makes Blake admiral, 
125; Cromwell's dealings 
with, after Second Civil 
War, 126; plans of union 
with King against army, 
129; Irish support of, 138; 
aided by Coote in Ireland, 
145; summons Cromwell 
from Ireland, 156; heir- 
ship to royal powers, 172; 
conflict with army after 
Scotch wars, 172 et seq.; 
law reform, 174; Dutch 
Wars, 174; non-reelection 
bill, 179, 181; its rule dis- 
tasteful to Cromwell, 188; 
under the Protectorate, 
191; representation under 
the Protectorate, 194 et 
seq.; dissolution of the 
Rump, 201 ; Second, under 
the Protectorate, 207 ; 
summoned by Richard 
Cromwell, 224; Cromwell's 
speech to Second Protec- 
torate Parliament, 227. 
See also Barebones; Com- 
mons; Rump; Long Par- 
liament, etc. 
Parliamentarians, military 
forces of, 55; strength of, 
58; in Cornwall and York- 
shire, 60; military leaders, 
66; resources, 66; weak- 
ness of their cavalry, 70; 
operations at Gainsbor- 
ough, 78; aided by the 
Scotch, 80; at York, 82; 
at Marston Moor, 84; at 
Copredy Bridge, 87 ; leader, 
removed by Cromwell, 
89; reorganization of 
army, 90; reverses after 
Marston Moor, 91; out- 
number Royalists at Nase- 



250 



Index 



by, 93 et seq.; dissensions 
of, after First Civil War, 
95 et seq.; opposition to 
Moderate Irish party, 146 

Peace, slothfulness of, under 
James I., 18, 19; desire for, 
by mercantile communi- 
ties, 175, 176 

Peasantry, in England, 59 

Pembroke (Ireland), capture 
of, by Royalists, 116 

Penal laws, English enforce- 
ment of, in Ireland, 156 

Penances, observed by Roy- 
alists on anniversaries of 
Charles I.'s death, 231 

Penn, at San Domingo, 221 

Peter the Great, 228 

Peters, Hugh, chaplain to 
Cromwell, 68 

Petition of Right, becomes 
law, 27; disregarded by 
the King, 30; supported 
by Cromwell, 43 

Philadelphia, church to Roy- 
al Martyr there, 133 

Philip of Spain, bigotry of, 
16; merciless to persons of 
his own faith in other na- 
tionalities, 150 

Philiphaugh, Battle of, 94 

Philippines, the, American 
volunteers in, 64 

Phillips, Wendell, American 
Abolitionist, 99 

Phineas, 154 

Pikemen, their function in 
seventeenth-century war, 
57; tactical position of, 
57; at Winwick Church, 
123 

Pistols, use of, by seven- 
teenth-century cavalry, 57 

Plantations, English, in Ire- 
land, 15, 140 

Platform, American Repub- 
licans' in i860, 187 



Plundering, suppressed by 
Cromwell, 72; punish- 
ments for, at Winchester, 
94: Cromwell's suppres- 
sion of, in Scotland, 126, 

_ T 47 

Policy, necessity of adjusting 

a nation's foreign and do- 
mestic, 19; Cromwell actu- 
ated by, 89 

Pope, the, Cromwell's view 
of, 167 

Portuguese, the, 16 

Prayer- Book, the, Laud's at- 
tempted introduction of, 
at Edinburgh, 37; pro- 
hibited under the Pro- 
tectorate, 191; denied to 
Episcopalians under the 
Commonwealth , 210 

Preachers, arrest of, under 
the Protectorate, 193 

Presbyterian Church, in Scot- 
land, 18 

Presbyterian, English, natu- 
ral allies of Scotch, 53 

Presbyterian ministers, in 
Scotland, 125 

Presbyterian Royalists, 
against the army, 115; in 
Parliament, 171 

Presbyterianism, its growth 
in the Anglican Church 
under James I., 22; sym- 
pathy with Scottish revolt, 
38; orthodoxy of, 77 

Presbyterians, in Parliamen- 
tarian army, 73; in Civil 
Wars, 88; generals in 
House of Commons, 89, 90; 
intolerance of, 100; faith 
of, 102; ascendancy of, in 
Parliament, 104; their in- 
tolerance compared with 
Laud's, 104; feared by 
Puritans, 107; efforts at 
reconciliation with Parlia- 



Index 



251 



mentarians, in; take 
issue with the King against 
the army, in, 115; com- 
motion of, in London, 116; 
at Ulster, 117; cruel treat- 
ment of, as Puritan prison- 
ers, 124; in Parliament 
after Second Civil War, 126 
et seq.; in touch with Ul- 
ster Irish, 141; rupture 
with Independents, 145; 
stand against Cromwell, 
158; position under the 
Protectorate, 193, 212 

"Presbyter but Priest writ 
large," 107 

Presidency, the American, 
Lincoln's candidacy for, 99 

Preston, Battle of , ngetseq.; 
Second Civil War ended 
by, 124 

Preston, Irish leader, 143 

Pride, Colonel, Parliamen- 
tary leader, 76; at Pres- 
ton, 121; at Winwick 
Church, 123; in the Com- 
mons, 130 

Pride's Purge, 130 

Priests, loyalty of, to peas- 
ants in Ireland, 16; Mil- 
ton's view of, 107; slaugh- 
ter of, at Drogheda, 149; 
persecuted in Ireland, 215 

Prisoners, cruel treatment of, 
by Puritans, 124, 149, 168 

Property, threatened under 
the Protectorate, 197 

Protective tariffs, 176 

Protector, the, office of, 195 
et seq. 

Protectorate, the, 190 et seq.; 
rule of, in Ireland, 213 217 

Protectorate Parliament, dis- 
missed by Cromwell, 203, 
205, 206 

Protestantism, height of, in 
England, 9 ; European 



sects, n; modern indi- 
vidual results of, 12; the 
creed of liberty, 16 

Protestants in Ireland, Par- 
liament recognized by, 
142; Royalist, in Ireland, 
144, 146; war of Protest- 
ant powers, 178; position 
of, under Queen Mary, 210; 
in Ireland under the Pro- 
tectorate, 217; among the 
Swiss, 220; influence of, in 
Ireland, 229, 230 

Psalm-singing, by Puritans, 
at Winceby, 79; at Mars- 
ton Moor, 84; Basing 
House, 94; Dunbar, 165 

Public opinion, Cromwell in- 
fluenced by, 203 

Puritanism, Carlyle's opinion 
of, 3; beginning of the 
modern epoch, 4; growth 
under James I., 22; not 
widespread under Charles 
I., 28; character of, in 
Scotland, 36; characteris- 
tics of, 154 et seq.; apolo- 
gists for, 2 1 1 et seq. 

Puritans, sympathy of, with 
Scottish revolt, 38; their 
suspicions of the Episco- 
pacy, 54; psalm-singing at 
Winceby, 79; forces of, 
in army, 82; at Marston 
Moor, 84; phraseology of, 
in Cromwell's time, 102; 
Presbyterians feared by, 
107; hatred of Charles I., 
no; desire for vengeance 
on the King, 116; opposed 
by the Irish, 117; at Win- 
wick Church, 123; cruel 
treatment of prisoners ,124; 
justice of their punishment 
of the King, 132; disavow 
Irish alliance, 145; cruel- 
ties at Drogheda, 149 et 



252 



Index 



seq.; toleration, 160; op- 
posed to Covenanters at 
Dunbar, 164; in New Eng- 
land, 173; passion for re- 
ligious regulation, 206; 
lack of generosity to foes, 
209; rule of, in Ireland, 
216; great names among, 
224; attitude toward Ire- 
land, 230; true greatness 
of, 231 
Pym, Carlyle's opinion of, 3; 
original type of, 5; toler- 
ance of, 5 ; leadership in 
Parliament, 29; first mod- 
ern "leader," 30; speech 
on imprisonment of Straf- 
ford, 49,50; imprisonment 
of, 55; death, 77; his Par- 
liament, 171 

Quakers, 138 

Reed, Speaker, quoted, 227 

Reform, attempted by Par- 
liament, 175; by Rump 
Parliament, 178; in the 
Assembly, 186; practica- 
bility necessary in, 187 

Reformation, the, in Eng- 
land, 7; European results 
of, 8; in Scotland, 8 

Reformed Church, influence 
of, in European politics, 7 

Reformers, contradictions of, 
13; fanaticism of, under 
the Protectorate, 192 

Regicides, the, 134 

Regulars (soldiery) , advan- 
tages of, 62, 66; discipline 
of, 87; Ironsides as regu- 
lars, 139; ordinary type of , 

x 39 

Religious liberty, under the 

Protectorate, 191; Crom- 
well's view of, 212; incom- 
pleteness of, in Ireland,2i5 



Republican Convention (U. 
S.), i860, 186 

Republicanism in Parliamen- 
tary army, 104; Crom- 
well's, 126 

Republicans in England, not 
extremists, 108; after the 
Revolution, 137; under 
the Protectorate, 195; in 
the Commons, 197; in 
Second Protectorate Par- 
liament, 208 

Republicans (U. S.), after 
Civil War, 99 

Republics, in South America, 

Restoration, the, 207, 224; 
disgraceful effects of, 225 

Revolution of 1688, 6, 96; 
compared with Civil Wars, 
226, 227 

Revolution, Puritan, Crom- 
well's attempt to check it, 
114; Presbyterian support 
of, 127; Cromwell's atti- 
tude toward it, 137; im- 
permanent effects of, 173, 
182. See also American 
Revolution ; French 
Revolution, etc. 

Rhode Island, 161 

Ribble, river, 122 

Richelieu, 16 

Ritual, Cromwell's suppres- 
sion of, at Ely, 75 

Rochelle, Charles I.'s expe- 
dition against, 25, 26 

Roman Catholicism identi- 
fied with Spain in English 
opinion, 14; liberality of, 
in France, 16; Cromwell's 
intolerance of, 74; de- 
manded for State religion 
by Irish, 142 

Roman Catholics, intolerance 
of, 100; Irish revolt sup- 
ported by, 141; position 



Index 



253 



of, voider the Protectorate, 

191 
Rome, 12 
Root and Branch party, the, 

54 

Ross, capture of, by Crom- 
well, 152 

"Roundhead," term of re- 
proach in Parliamentary 
army, 72 

Roundhead army, 61; its 
foot, 70; at Marston Moor, 

85 
Royal Martyr, the, churches 

dedicated to, 133 
Royalist Delinquents, 178 
Royalist Protestants in Ire- 
land, 144, 146 
Royalists, at Nottingham, 
55, 56; strength of, 58; 
driven out of Cornwall, 60; 
military leaders of, 66; 
natural taste for war, 67; 
estates fined by Cromwell, 
76; at Grantham, 76, 77; 
defeated by Cromwell at 
Nottingham and Burleigh, 
77; stand at Gainsbor- 
ough, 78; defeated at 
Winceby, 79; forces in 
Civil Wars unestimated, 
82; at Marston Moor, 83 
et seq.; Copredy Bridge, 
87; hope of, in Scotland, 
90; outnumbered at Nase- 
by, 92 et seq.; end of, in 
Scotland, 94; surrender in 
1646, 94; union with Cath- 
olics and Presbyterians 
against Parliament, 115; 
united in Ireland, 141; in 
Irish wars, 144 et seq.; op- 
posed to the Common- 
wealth, 158; dissensions 
in Scotland, 160; Scottish 
reverses, 168; their end in 
England, 172; position 



under the Protectorate, 
192, 206, 209; penances 
done by, on anniversary of 
regicide, 231 

Royalists in American Revo- 
lution, 209 

Rump, the, 171, 175; disso- 
lution, 178, 181 

Rump Parliament, 178, i8r 

Rupert, Prince, Royalist 
leader, military training, 
66; at Powick, 68; his 
charge at Edgehill, 69; at 
Grantham, 77; dubs Crom- 
well Old Ironsides, 77; 
his brilliant tactics, 80; 
marches to relieve York, 
82, 83; against Cromwell 
at Marston Moor, 83, 85; 
his activity, 90, 91; at 
Naseby, 92, 93; his buc- 
caneering cruise, 125 

Russia, 9; majority rule 
unnatural to, 24; Charles 
X.'s policy toward, 218; 
under Peter the Great, 228 

Russians, the, under Ivan the 
Terrible, 203 

Sabbath, observance of, un- 
der the Protectorate, 206 

Sailors, fame of English, in 
seventeenth century, 13; 
the Dutch as, 175 

St. Bartholomew, Massacre 
of, 38 

St. Fagan's, Welsh defeat at, 
116 

St. Ives, Cromwell's farm at, 

43 
St. John, Oliver, Cromwell s 

cousin by marriage, 44 
St. Peter's, Drogheda, 149 
San Domingo, English expe- 
dition against, 221 
Santa Cruz, Blake's victory 
over the Spanish there, 220 



254 



Index 



Savoy, Duke of, his persecu- 
tion of the Vaudois, 219, 
220 

Scotch, defeat Charles I.'s 
forces in Bishops' Wars, 
39; adventurers in the 
Netherlands, 56; relations 
with Parliamentarians, 75; 
they aid the Parliamen- 
tarians, 80; besiege York, 
82; at Marston Moor, 
83; their military qual- 
ities, 90; Charles I.'s sur- 
render to, 94; relations 
with Charles I. in Parlia- 
ment, 111; declare for 
King against army, 115; 
they aid the Cavaliers, 116; 
in Second Civil War, 117; 
Presbyterians at Ulster, 
117; union with Royalists, 
119; at Preston, 120-123; 
Puritan treatment of, 124; 
support Parliament after 
Second Civil War, 126; in 
touch with Ulster, 141; 
share in Irish war, 142; at 
Trim, 151; declare for 
Charles II., 156, 158; losses 
at Dunbar, 165; assemble 
at Stirling, 168; immigrants 
into Ireland, 215; their 
share in British expansion, 
229 

Scotch Highlanders, military 
type of, in Civil Wars, 91 

Scotch Presbyterians, sup- 
port Charles II., 145 

Scotland, character of, 17; 
Episcopacy rejected there, 
36, 39; demands indemnity 
after Bishops' Wars, 39, 
40; its claims paid by 
the Long Parliament, 52; 
makes terms with Charles 
I., 53; brawls in, 56; 
league with Parliamenta- 



rians, 77; Royalist hope 
of, 90; end of Royalist 
party there, 94; complex 
political conditions, 117, 
118; Royalists and Cove- 
nanters, 159, 160; subdued 
by Parliamentarians, 172; 
definitive union with Eng- 
land, 194; rule under the 
Protectorate, 213 

Scout-master, 81 

Sea power, Spanish, in six- 
teenth century, 219 

Secession, right of, in Ameri- 
can States, 60 

Sectaries, Parliamentarian 
intolerance of, 1 1 1 ; hatred 
of the Kirk for, 163 

Self-denying Ordinance, the, 
89, 90 

Self-government, qualities of, 
227 

" Serving men and tapsters," 
70 

Severn, river, 68 

Seymour, American Vice- 
President, 99 

Sheridan, American cavalry 
commander, 67; compared 
with Cromwell in pursuit, 

165 

Ship Money, 33; payment of, 
refused by Hampden, 34, 
44; declared illegal by 
Long Parliament, 52 

Short Parliament, hostility 
of, to Charles I., 39. See 
also Parliament 

Sixty-seventh Regiment, 
Cromwell's captaincy in, 55 

Skippon, Parliamentarian 
major-general, wounded 
at Naseby, 93; 

Slavery, prisoners of Puri- 
tans sold into, 124, 147; in 
the United States, 187 

Sligo, captured, 143 



Index 



255 



Smithfield, 38 

Soldiers, citizen and regular 
types compared, 62-66; 
veterans at Marston Moor, 
83; pay neglected by Par- 
liament, 112; Scotch, at 
Preston, 123; their ready 
changes of allegiance, 123; 
religion not always a cause 
of efficiency among them, 
160 

South Africa, volunteers in, 
64 

South American republics, 
187 

Southerners, in the United 
States, 98 

Spain, feared by England in 
sixteenth century, 14; su- 
premacy of, 14; her bar- 
barities compared with 
those of Turkey, 15; nat- 
ural foe of France, 1 7 ; sea 
power crushed by the 
Dutchadmirals,i7; oppres- 
sions of the Dutch, 35, 141; 
her cruelties, 156; her 
colonial policy, 217; Crom- 
well's interference with, 
218; war with France, 219; 
defeated by England in 
the Netherlands, 221 

Spaniards, English victories 
over them on the sea, 175; 
their cruelty, 210 

Speaker of the House, Crom- 
well's letter to, 101 

Speeches, character of Crom- 
well's, 195, 197 

Star Chamber, the, 27; its 
subserviency to the King, 
31; Cromwell's hatred of, 
51; abolished by Long 
Parliament, 52 

States rights, doctrine of, in 
the United States, 60; in 
English counties, 60 



Steward. See Cromwell, 
Elizabeth S. 

Stirling, assembling of Scotch 
forces there, 168 

Strafford, Lord, minister of 
Charles I., his jealousy of 
Buckingham, 26; his abet- 
ting of the King, 32 ; raised 
to the Peerage, 33 ; his rule 
in Ireland, 34; returns 
from Ireland, 39; his im- 
peachment and defence, 
49; death, 50; the King's 
treachery to him, 132 

Strategy, lack of , in 1643, 76; 
Cromwell's principles of, 
162; "Stonewall" Jack- 
son's and Cromwell's com- 
pared, 165 

Stuart, American Confeder- 
ate cavalry commander, 6 7 

Stuart, House of the, 134; its 
weakness against the Com- 
monwealth, 139; reestab- 
lishment of, 224 

Stuarts, the English Kings, 
7 ; England under their 
rule, 8; their supposed 
spiritual supremacy, 9 ; 
their ignorance of their 
people, 1 1 ; weakness of 
their domestic and foreign 
policy, 19; their belief in 
the divine right of kings, 
20; reactionary type of, 23; 
their power curtailed by 
Petition of Right, 27; 
Charles I. the type of, 129; 
their bearing in exile, 192; 
comparisons with Crom- 
well, 204; their Restora- 
tion, 207; taxation during 
their reigns, 209, 217 

Suffrage, manhood, advo- 
cated by the Levellers, 107; 
under the Protectorate, 
194 



256 



Index 



Sunday, observance of, 206, 

207 
Supreme Council of Dublin, 

the, 145 
Sweden, champion of the 

Reformation, 25 
Swiss, mercenaries, hired by 

Cromwell, 220 
Swords, use of, by cavalry, 

o 57 

Syracusans, the, oppressions 

of, 203 

Tactics, shock and fire com- 
pared, 57; at Marston 
Moor, 83; Scots', at Pres- 
ton, 119, 120 

Tartar yoke in Russia, the, 
203 

Taxation, in England, by 
Parliament, 178; under 
the Protectorate, 209; 
under the Commonwealth, 
209 

Ten Commandments, the, 44 

Thirty Years' War, the, 
France's share in, 17; in 
Germany, 25; its height at 
death of Gustavus, 38; 
its influence on Cromwell, 
42; soldiery in, 62; Crom- 
well's inclination to take 
part in it, 113 

Thornhaugh, Colonel, Par- 
liamentary leader of horse, 
122 

Tilly, 124, 150 

Timoleon, 200 

Tithes, 186 

Tolerance, in the modern 
world, 12; falseness of, in 
seventeenth century, 18. 
See also Catholics, Crom- 
well, Puritans, etc. 

Tonnage and poundage, 
28; declaration against its 
pay without Parliamen- 



tary consent, 30; declared 
illegal by Long Parliament, 

5 2 

Tories, in America, 209 

Tower of London, the, Eliot's 
imprisonment there, 31; 
Laud's, 50 

Trade, in Europe, in the 
seventeenth century, 175, 
176 

Trim (Ireland), captured by 
Parliamentarians, 151 

Tromp, the elder, in the 
Spanish wars, 17, 176 

Tudors, English sovereigns, 
unarmed despots, 10, 11; 
their relations with Eng- 
lish commercial classes, 10; 
with middle class, 10 

Tunis, Blake at, 220 

Turenne, regular soldiers 
under, 140; service of 
British troops under, 221 

Turks, cruelty of, 210, 220 

Tyranny, English intoler- 
ance of, 11; Cromwell's 
tyranny defined, 203 et 
seq., 208; Charles I.'s, 226 

Ulster, Scotch Presbyte- 
rians at, 117; Irish rising 
there, 141; captured by 
Parliamentarians, 145; 
massacres by Cromwell- 
ians there, 146, 151; under 
the Protectorate, 216 

Ultramontanes, the, 143, 144 

Uniforms, variety of, in Par- 
liamentary army, 61; ori- 
gin of present English, 221 

Union, War of the, in the 
United States, 187; its 
salutary effects, 200, 201. 
See also American Civil 
War 

Unitarians, 75 

United States, the, religious 



Index 



257 



tolerance of, compared 
with Cromwell's, 47; polit- 
ical theorists, 108; Aboli- 
tionists, 185; Constitution 
of, 190; government of, 
191; practical good sense 
of, 211 

Valley Campaigns, Stonewall 

Jackson's, 165 
Vane, Sir Harry, 179, 181 
Van Heemskirk, his prowess 

against Spain, 17 
Vaudois, the, persecutions 

of, 219, 220 
Venables, at San Domingo, 

221 
Venetian government, Pur- 
itans' prisoners sold to, 124 
Verdelin, Regiment of, 217 
Verney, 149 

Veto, the Protector's, 190 
Victoria, Queen, 130 
Virginia, Puritans' prisoners 

there, 124 
Volunteers (soldiery) , in 

American Civil War, 62; 

compared with regulars, 

63-66; Ironsides as, 139; 

rawness of, 161 

Wales, Royalist rising there 
in Second Civil War, 116; 
Cromwell's administration 
there, 209 

Wallenstein, 124, 150 

Waller, Parliamentary gen- 
eral, at Copredy Bridge, 87 

War-ships, Dutch, 176 

Washington, compared with 
Pym and Hampden, 5, 35; 
his superiority over Crom- 
well, 51; his regular sol- 
diery, 87; character of, 97; 
disinclination to dictator- 
ship, 97; his lofty plane, 
99; his judicious govern- 

17 



ment, 106; his statesman- 
ship, 182, 184; his influ- 
ence on the United States 
Constitution, 190; his for- 
bearance, 200 

Waterloo, Battle of, com- 
pared with Marston Moor, 
86 

Wayne, American Revolu- 
tionary general, 87 

Wellington, 140 

Welsh War, 116, 117 

Wentworth, Sir Thomas, 26; 
character of, 32. See also 
Strafford 

West Indies, English rule in, 
221 

Westminster, Long Parlia- 
ment meets there, 40; 
Cromwell installed there, 
192 

Westminster Hall, Crom- 
well's head exposed there 
by Restorationists, 225 

West Point advantages of 
its training, 64 

Wexford, Cromwellian atroc- 
ities there, 150; Crom- 
well's storming of, 152, 

Whigamore Raid, the, in 

Scotland, 125 
Whitehall, Palace of, 42, 55; 

Charles I. beheaded there, 

132 
Whitewarts, the, at Marston 

Moor, 85 
William the Conqueror, his 

Lords, 103 
William III., English King, 

96; his ability, 97; the real 

successor of Cromwell, 226, 

227 
Williams, original name of 

the Cromwells, 40 
Willoughby, Lord, Parlia- 
mentary general, at Gains- 



2 5 8 



Index 



borough, 78; Cromwell's 
charges against, 81 

Wilson, American cavalry- 
man, 67 

Winceby, Battle of, 79 

Winchester, occupied by 
Cromwell, 94 

Winchester, Marquis of, Roy- 
alist leader, 94 

Winwick Church, the Scotch 
at, 123 

Worcester, Battle of, 169, 
171, 174; anniversary of, 
223 



"Word of the Lord, the," 45, 

46 

Yeomanry, in England, 56, 

58 
York, the siege of, 82 ; fall of, 

*? 
Yorkshire, neutrality of, 60; 

its troops at Marston Moor, 

83 et seq.; rising for Charles 

I. there, 117; troops in 

Second Civil War, 119; at 

Preston, 122 



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